Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lil Rel Howery: Live in Crenshaw’ On HBO, Where It’s All Relative

From coaching Uncle Drew on film to having to plan his actual uncle’s funeral, Lil Rel Howery keeps it very real in his first HBO special, Lil Rel Howery: Live in Crenshaw.

LIL REL HOWERY: LIVE IN CRENSHAW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The hour opens with the national anthem. No, not the Star Spangled Banner. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” aka the Black national anthem, as sung here by Akua Willis, and followed up by a performance from the LA Youth Step Team. It feels like a high-school pep rally, because it’s filmed inside the gymnasium of Susan Miller Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, during the day, with late-afternoon sunlight still streaming in through the large gym windows.

Howery first grabbed most people’s attention as a supporting actor on NBC’s The Carmichael Show, where he played Jerrod Carmichael’s brother and was married to a woman played by a then-unknown Tiffany Haddish. Carmichael directs Howery here.

But Lil Rel has gotten big since that sitcom, thanks to his scene-stealing performances in films such as Get Out and Bird Box, serving as the center of the all-star basketball comedy Uncle Drew, as well as his TV turns on Insecure and his own eponymous sitcom. All of which plays into this hour, which focuses on how his family views him differently now that he’s famous.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Howery is a contemporary of fellow West Side Chicago comedian Hannibal Buress. But Lil Rel truly is the comedic heir of the late great Southsider Bernie Mac, carrying on the “King of Comedy’s” vibe, likability and propensity for real talk about his family. The gritty, documentary look of Howery’s HBO special comes straight out of the playbook Carmichael has refined in recent years on various other stand-up hours with fellow executive producers Bo Burnham, Chris Storer and Jeff Tomsic.

Memorable Jokes: Most of the hour weaves stories in and out of how his family guilts him into paying for and handling the funeral duties for a wayward uncle.

But first, he finds several minutes of funny providing commentary about a viral video from July that documented another family’s fight that took place in the middle of Disneyland. If you need context for that, here you go:

Did you say you wanted the NSFW full uncensored video? Let’s play the feud!

But back to the Howery family.

Lil Rel finds comedy gems out of each nugget in the story of how his uncle’s funeral played out, from the initial family sit-down (and who gets to sit down in that meeting), to how they called him to break the news, to individual moments during the service (the cousin who cannot read very well, the guy who tries to sing all of the parts of a hymn, the preacher forced to deliver a eulogy for a man he doesn’t know at all) that has the audience members in Crenshaw leaping out of their seats delivering hallelujahs of their own. “Ooooh, that was worth $6,000,” Howery jokes. But wait. There’s more to the story. We follow him and his grandmother and the casket to his uncle’s final resting place.

And that trip provides memorable tangents, too. Thanks, Greyhound.

Our Take: As Howery jokes, musical acts these days may not put on concerts like they used to. But watching Howery re-enact The Whispers “Rock Steady,” or Bone Thugs-n-Harmony without the harmony, or Tito Jackson without his brothers, is a performance in itself. “I’m just trying to do right by black people,” Howery says much earlier in the hour.

He’s fulfilling his promise.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’ll make you wonder what could’ve been had FOX given Rel more of a chance, like it had with The Bernie Mac Show.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Lil Rel Howery: Live in Crenshaw on HBO GO and HBO NOW