Jamie Foxx began his career as a comedian, finding success through comedy sketches like In Living Color. The Kingdom actor soon secured his own sitcom show, The Jamie Foxx Show. As his career progressed, the Law Abiding Citizen actor shifted his focus to more dramatic roles. His role as blind musician Ray Charles in the biographical film, Ray, won him the Best Actor Oscar in 2005.
However, Foxx’s roots remain in the comedy genre and the actor revealed in an earlier interview that it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell a joke these days. With the recent controversies surrounding the Collateral actor, his remarks on this topic gained attention again.
Jamie Foxx Revealed That Too Many People Get Offended By His Jokes
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Jamie Foxx shared that it was challenging as a comedian to make jokes in the new age. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 actor revealed to Joe Rogan that he had even received death threats from several organizations due to the seemingly harmless jokes that he had made on numerous occasions.
Foxx recounted a specific incident on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he managed to upset two different groups of people with his jokes. First, while participating in the Musical Genre Challenge against the host, the Ali actor playfully presented a Broadway-style rendition of Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out. However, Foxx’s ad-lib mentioning Pitbull dogs as “cantankerous” drew backlash from the Pitbull community.
In yet another incident on the same show, Jimmy Fallon was concluding the show by announcing the next week’s program which happened to feature a deaf person. As Fallon did his conclusion, Foxx was ignorantly signing the message as a joke, which understandably offended a lot of people. About his jokes misfiring on the show, the Baby Driver actor told Joe Rogan:
“I try to tell people, I said, ‘Hey, listen we never mean anything bad. We poke fun, but we’re not… We don’t mean anything bad but you can’t kill us, all right. Cuz I gotta keep doing what I do, you know, so it’s getting tougher.”
Foxx was clearly making a commentary on the prevailing notion of cancel culture within Hollywood. Interestingly, the Miami Vice actor found himself embroiled in a much more serious controversy when he faced accusations of making anti-Semitic remarks in an Instagram story.
Jamie Foxx Received Massive Backlash For Controversial Anti-Semitic Remarks
In a now-deleted Instagram post, Jamie Foxx wrote a warning message to certain “fake friends”, quoting, “They killed this dude named Jesus… What do you think they’ll do to you???!”. The Annie actor sparked an Internet controversy, as he was accused of targeting the Jewish community. The post was interpreted as perpetuating the anti-Semitic idea that Jews should be blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus.
Foxx was quick to come up with an apology, clarifying that he never intended to hurt any sentiments of any community. His apology read (via Instagram):
“I want to apologize to the Jewish community and everyone who was offended by my post. I now know my choice of words have caused offense and I’m sorry. That was never my intent.”
The controversy has put Jamie Foxx’s career in jeopardy and the question remains whether he can make a strong comeback from this mess. It also highlights the issues of cancel culture that the Django Unchained actor had attempted to address during his Joe Rogan podcast appearance.
Source: PowerfulJRE – YouTube, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – YouTube, iamjamiefoxx – Instagram
