Opinion | We’re all rooting for Jamie Foxx. But his Netflix special is a missed opportunity.

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.

Taking his audience back to 2023 and his “mystery illness,” the now 56-year-old comedian says, “What had happened was…. April 11, I was having a bad headache. And I asked my boy for an aspirin … I was having such a bad headache … Before I could get the aspirin [Foxx snaps his fingers] I went out.”

Foxx goes on to describe having no memory of 20 whole days and working with a physical therapist who out-cussed him and made him walk when he didn’t want to. Then he recounts having a flash of realization while talking to a psychiatrist.

God, he says, countered his Job-like complaining with a pointed question: “When’s the last time you’ve been to church?”

Assuming Foxx wants “What Had Happened Was” to help others — and there’s every reason to believe he does — his routine is a missed opportunity. “Jamie Foxx don’t get strokes,” he quotes himself saying when he’s trying to make sense of what happened to him. “That’s old man s—.”

But it’s not. One of my good friends had a stroke when she was 36. Another person in my wider circle had a stroke at 39. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 38% of people hospitalized for stroke in the U.S. are younger than 65.

Two years later, when that first friend, a college administrator, was having a second stroke, she arrived at a hospital ER with halting speech, general confusion, a history of stroke and unable to sign her name, she was turned away and sent back home.

Foxx, with all his money and connections, seems to have been similarly failed by the medical establishment. He says the first doctor who examined him suggested a cortisone shot. “I don’t know if you can do Yelps for doctors,” he jokes, “but that’s half a star.” Dissatisfied with this, he said, his sister drove around Atlanta and saw Piedmont Hospital, where they found a doctor who took her brother’s symptoms seriously.

Thus, Foxx has all the material he needs to bless his audience with potentially life-saving awareness. These medical emergencies happen to people of all ages, and yet patients aren’t getting the life-saving treatment they need because too many people in the medical profession who ought to know the symptoms of stroke still don’t.

Instead, he 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.