Usher and Alicia Keys caused a stir when they hugged each other during their 2024 Super Bowl halftime show performance. Many people, including rapper Boosie BadAzz, criticized Usher and said he should apologize to Swizz Beatz, Alicia’s husband. One of the funniest recurring jokes on social media was the resemblance between the situation and a Boondocks episode that parodied the singer. In the episode, a married woman became obsessed with the R&B singer and acted like a groupie in front of her husband.
Usher addressed the episode in a recent interview with The Breakfast Club and shared his thoughts on it.
“I hit Regina [King] about that, they crazy,” he said chuckling. “It’s funny but that’s the truth of the other side of what happens. That’s the Usher effect I guess, I don’t know.”
Moving on to the memes and discussions surrounding his performance with Alicia Keys, Usher clarified that it was all in good fun. “In no way anything that was done there should have been viewed as bad or any way perverted or any way like that. It was literally about having fun because of a song me and Alicia made many years ago,” he explained. “We laughed about it. It’s crazy how people pick their angle. It’s all about how you present things. But it’s all love.”
The Boondocks episode, titled “Tom, Sarah and Usher,” drew from a real-life experience of executive producer Carl Jones. During dinner at Mr. Chow’s, his then-wife’s reaction to Usher’s presence mirrored the episode’s storyline. Jones recounted the awkwardness of the situation and how it influenced the episode’s creation.
He explained that The Boondocks got picked up for a second season and he and his ex-wife joined Aaron McGruder, and their friends for dinner at Mr. Chow’s to celebrate. While at dinner, the group talked about the notorious R. Kelly episode. Jones said that his wife hated it and thought they shouldn’t have done it. After she expressed her opinion and refused to eat, Jones said that the mood at the table was ruined.
That changed when Usher walked into the restaurant. “She starts smiling and blushing and all this stuff, and I’m like ‘what’s going on?’ I didn’t even realize Usher walked in, I just noticed that she was all of a sudden in a great mood,” Jones said. “And then I looked over and I saw Usher was sitting right behind us and she was turned around trying to get his attention and waving and stuff.
“I’m extremely embarrassed at this point. I was already embarrassed with the R. Kelly stuff so I’m extremely embarrassed at this point. So we got ready to leave and we headed towards the door and I remember I turned around and looked back and she was over at his table. She was over at his table and she was telling us to come back. So we slowly walked back over to Usher’s table and she started introducing everybody to Usher.”
So she was like ‘Usher this is Aaron, and this is Shaun and then she got to me and she said ‘this is my… this is Carl [laughs]. So, it was a long ride home and then the next day I came into the office and they were like ‘You know we putting that in the show. It’s going in the show.’”
Jones humorously revealed that his embarrassing encounter with Usher inspired a scene in the episode where he played the waiter.
“So fun fact, I played the waiter that came over to get the plate of ice cream and saw Tom was all sad, and he was like ‘sorry man, he said I wouldn’t let that shit happen to me though,’ that was me and I did let it happen to me.”
You can watch Carl Jones explain his Usher moment in the clip below.
