"Chevy Chase, one of [Donald] Glover’s co-stars [in 'Community'], often tried to disrupt his scenes and made racial cracks between takes. ('People think you’re funnier because you’re black.')"
"[Dan Harmon, the show’s creator] said, 'Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off. I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, "I don’t even worry about it."' Glover told me, 'I just saw Chevy as fighting time—a true artist has to be O.K. with his reign being over. I can’t help him if he’s thrashing in the water. But I know there’s a human in there somewhere—he’s almost too human.' (Chase said, 'I am saddened to hear that Donald perceived me in that light.'*) Glover quit in the fifth season, too bored to do it anymore."
From "Donald Glover Can’t Save You/The creator of 'Atlanta' wants TV to tell hard truths. Is the audience ready?" in The New Yorker.
I zeroed in on the Chevy Chase business (because we were just talking about his road rage problem), but there's also a man-in-shorts angle:
[Glover's character on "Atlanta"]... wasn’t a great manager or a great part-time boyfriend or, for that matter, a particularly promising human being. Curiously boyish in shorts and a backpack, he wasn’t even active, the minimal standard for television characters. He didn’t seem to do or want anything. He just watched and flinched and got yelled at to grow up....Here's a picture of him in shorts.
Comedy didn’t allow him to express the sadness he’d begun to feel—about race, about fame, about simply being human—so he turned to music.... [As Childish Gambino, he] offered earnest tracks about being bullied as a child and about suicidal thoughts—a counterpoint to rap’s hypermasculine mainstream. Fam Udeorji told me, “People thought Donald was a whiny dude who wasn’t into his blackness. And the shorts he wore onstage were so short they made my friends uncomfortable.”
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* The light was "human... almost too human." How sad is that?
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