Jaleel White talks about Steve Urkel, child stars and how to “captivate audiences”
Early on in his new memoir, Jaleel white informs readers that he also wants you to see the book as an offer to star in a TV show. It’s been about 35 years since White first donned a pair of stilettos that relied too heavily on suspenders and entered sitcom history as Steve Urkel, the villain of the beloved sitcom Family issues. But stay Urkel grew up (Simon & Schuster), White, 47, is less interested in the outlandish plots à la TGIF’s underpinnings and more interested in what he’s learned in the years he’s balanced child stardom with a relatively normal life.
White spoke to Vanity fair about how Steve Urkel—and his alter ego Stefan Urquelle—captivated a generation and how his parents kept him grounded throughout. “My mom is a hover mom,” he explains. “That’s how I’m protected in that special way. Her instinct was always to keep me in my place as a kid and keep me on the path to college.
Although the show stopped airing in 1998, White has remained active as a cast member ever since. However, one of the starting points for his essays on various aspects of his years in the business was the feeling that he had not navigated the transition to adulthood. matured as well as he could have hoped. In the book he talks about the role he didn’t get, opposite Claire Danes, because he wasn’t sharp enough and he exposed his complicated relationship with Bill Cosby. For years, White toiled to make an animated film based on Brown Hornet, a supporting character in Cosby’s. Fat Albert universe, but was never able to make it happen, for reasons he explains here.
Vanity Fair: I rewatched the first seasons of family problems, and you are such a great physical comedian. How are you so good at such a young age?
White Jaleel: First, to be a good physical comedian, you’re going to have to have pretty good coordination. So luckily I’m on the more coordinated side. But you also have to have good teachers. rich, who was our main director at the time, loved comedy and he saw that I could do that right away. He taught me how to hit the door with my foot and at the same time throw my head back so I could make a sound. Then no one realized that it was coming from my feet and not my head. I was a television student before I started on the show, so I knew of characters like Jack Tripper and obviously anything Jerry Lewis did. Incorporating that into the character was encouraged by the writing team, it was taught by our directors, and it happened to be in my DNA.
That style has now completely disappeared. It starts with Funniest family videos many things, and then it evolved into what we can see on social media. Now failure—and I mean real failure, hard failure—you see that so commonly on social media now, and how can you expect performers to replicate it with that level of authenticity? Mainstream television has completely moved away from family television or broad comedy, as it’s called, so there’s no one worth doing to further their career.
The goofy Black guy has forever been an important part of Black culture, but Urkel was the first time that role entered the mainstream. Why do you think he was such a big hit?
Well, first of all, you’re definitely circling what I’m about to say. Black offerings on television have long been considered monolithic, as if there really was only one authentic black story to tell. Purely by accident—and due to a failure in the development of the TV show—Steve Urkel was born, and I always saw that character as an unexpected bridge between a predominantly white writer’s room and an all-black cast.
If you really look at it, that’s exactly what he did. Steve loves cheese, polka dots and the accordion. He can rattle off any facts and has a huge store of knowledge of the random type. For a predominantly white staff, being able to write about that was a dream come true. I found a way to make it soulful and sell it. At its core, it was Steve’s kindness and confidence that truly brought comfort to so many people who also felt awkward growing up in the 1990s.
