Jamie Foxx’s new Netflix special missed a big opportunity

Jamie Foxx believes God tormented him because he stopped going to church.

“When I forgot God,” the comedian tells an Atlanta audience in his new Netflix special, “He blessed me with a stroke.”

A viewer unfamiliar with the ins and outs of black church culture might be confused by “What Had Happened Was,” particularly the way Foxx turns what is billed as a stand-up routine into an hour-long testimony service about a God who is “always good”. and, as Foxx tells it, he showed that kindness by letting his brain bleed.

The now 56-year-old comedian takes his audience back to 2023 and his “mysterious illness” and says: “What happened was…. On April 11th I had a bad headache. And I asked my boy for an aspirin…I had such a bad headache…Before I could get the aspirin (Foxx snaps his fingers), I walked out.”

Foxx goes on to describe how he couldn’t remember for a full 20 days and that he worked with a physical therapist who insulted him and made him walk when he didn’t want to. He then tells how a sudden realization came to him while talking to a psychiatrist.

God, he says, countered his professional whining with a pointed question: “When was the last time you went to church?”

Assuming Foxx wants to help others with “What Had Happened Was” — and there’s every reason to believe he does — then his routine is a missed opportunity. “Jamie Foxx doesn’t get strokes,” he quotes himself as he tries to understand what happened to him. “That’s an old man’s shit.”

But that’s not it. One of my good friends suffered a stroke when she was 36 years old. Another person close to me suffered a stroke at the age of 39. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 38% of people hospitalized for a stroke in the United States are younger than 65 years old.

Two years later, when that first friend, a college administrator, suffered a second stroke, she arrived at a hospital emergency room with halting speech and general confusion. a history of strokes Unable to sign her name, she was turned away and sent home.

Foxx, for all his money and connections, also appears to have been abandoned by the medical establishment. He says the first doctor who examined him suggested a cortisone shot. “I don’t know if you can make Yelps for doctors,” he jokes, “but that’s half a star.” Unhappy with that, he said, his sister drove around Atlanta and went to Piedmont Hospital, where they found a doctor, who took her brother’s symptoms seriously.

So Foxx has all the material he needs to provide his audience with potentially life-saving awareness. These medical emergencies happen to people of all ages, and yet patients do not receive the life-saving treatment they need because too many people in the medical community who should know the symptoms of a stroke still don’t.

Instead, he provides a fascinating if frustrating example of black folk theology, using his return to the stage to praise a God who sickens and immobilizes those he loves. And perhaps encourage stroke survivors in the audience to ask themselves whether they, too, have offended the Almighty.