Currently streaming on Netflix, Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was ... is not for the faint of heart. But if you can take a lot of bad language and raw talk, it'll make you laugh, and it'll make you cry.
Back in April 2023, Foxx (legal name Eric Bishop) suffered a medical emergency that took him out of the public eye for many months. Rumors ran rampant, including an Internet meme that Foxx had died and been replaced by a clone.
Performing in October in front of a packed Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, Foxx revealed that he had a brain bleed that caused a stroke -- and that the doctors at Piedmont Hospital (just 400 yards from the theater) saved his life.
But it was his sister Diedra Dixon, whom he described as "4-foot-11 of nothing but pure love," who recognized the severity of his "headache," and took her brother to the hospital.
Of that, Foxx said, "She drove around -- she didn't know anything about Piedmont Hospital, but she had a hunch that some angels [were] in there."
He relates how his sister knelt and prayed during the surgery that followed, and knew that the doctor would not find the source of the bleeding, because she had "talked to God."
Foxx eventually wound up in a rehab center in Chicago, where he faced a long, humiliating, excruciating road to recovery.
With humor, heart and music, Foxx tells the story of his recovery -- often in graphic detail -- but the overall messages of the special were to thank those in his life who protected and supported him ... and to give glory to God both for his stroke and his recovery.
This did not set well with a critic at MSNBC.com:
Jamie Foxx believes that God afflicted him because he'd stopped attending church.
"When I forgot about God," the comedian tells an Atlanta audience in his new Netflix special, "he blessed me with a stroke."
A viewer unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Black church culture might be bewildered by "What Had Happened Was," especially at the way Foxx turns what's billed as a stand-up routine into an hourlong testimony service about a God who's good "all the time" and, in Foxx's telling, exhibited that goodness by causing his brain to bleed.
The critic would have preferred that Foxx did more of a PSA on recognizing the symptoms of a stroke, saying that Foxx instead ...
... provides a fascinating, if frustrating, example of Black folk theology by using his return to the stage to praise a God who sickens and immobilizes those he loves. And maybe prompts stroke patients in the audience to wonder if they, too, have offended the Almighty.
Whether or not Foxx intended to say that God CAUSED his stroke (it's a personal testimony and a comedy routine, so that's up for interpretation), what do Catholics believe?