On the Shelf
‘Growing Up Urkel’
By Jaleel White
Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $29
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Jaleel White is feeling kind of cool. “My wife cranked up this air conditioning,” he says from his hotel room in New York while on tour to promote his new memoir, “Growing Up Urkel.” But Steve Urkel, as any consumer of ’90s pop culture can tell you, was anything but cool. The character White played from 1989 to 1998 on the wholesome hit sitcom “Family Matters” defined the Black nerd for TV watchers: saddle shoes, suspenders, thick glasses, high, nasal voice. Sure, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” had Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro), but he was more of an entitled, clueless preppy. Urkel was Poindexter personified.
White, now 47, will forever be connected to the character he created in a series that he essentially picked up and put on his shoulders; Urkel didn’t arrive until midway through the first season but quickly became the main attraction. He’s not hiding from it; that would be pointless. “Growing Up Urkel” is not “I Am Not Spock,” Leonard Nimoy’s insistent memoir about what differentiated him from the logic-obsessed Vulcan he played on “Star Trek.” Instead it’s something rare: a reminiscence from a remarkably well-adjusted and good-humored former child star that still manages to tell some tales about what he calls “the shark-infested waters of show business.”
His primary motive for writing the book, he says, was pretty simple: “I wanted to give my parents their flowers while they’re still here. All I see are these showbiz tragedy stories. My parents didn’t know what the heck they were doing, but the most important thing was they had good intentions for me. My family and I, we really had very little understanding of leverage. We were stuck in appreciation mode. And I think that’s good to some degree.”
Born in Culver City and raised in a middle-class Pasadena family, White was taught to work hard and be grateful for what he had. He recalled that his mother made sure to keep him from getting a big head, asking people on the “Family Matters” set to keep constant tabs on him. Expensive cars and designer clothes weren’t an option; when he learned to drive he was pushing the family’s hand-me-down Acura. He was happy if he could stay outfitted in fly Nike gear (which became easier when pro sports teams got word that he was a basketball fanatic and sent him boxes of the latest stuff).
“When I started on the show, I was a 12-year-old kid who wanted an audition and wanted to get the job so my parents would give me a Sega Genesis,” he said. Polite and chivalrous — his parents sent him to etiquette school so he could learn how to be a gentleman — he writes about his early dating experience with a mix of laughter and chagrin: “My mom had done such a miraculous job sheltering me from negative influences she had effectively made me an overconfident, generous-minded dunce for teen girls to roll over.”
In short, he was a good kid with good parents, qualities that didn’t always come in handy when it was time for ABC to pay him commensurately with other TV stars. He writes that the series’ producers dissuaded him from pursuing ancillary Urkel opportunities lest he become “overexposed.” In one of the book’s most telling anecdotes, a 14-year-old White is grounded by his mother after an argument. When his parents inform the “Family Matters” producers that he’s sick and unable to come to work, a series of gift baskets arrives at the White family home, along with an offer to send a doctor. White writes that ABC assumed his family was pulling a ”sick-out,” a common ploy used by parents of child stars angling for more money. But when White returned to work the next day, his family made no demands. Turns out they were just disciplining their son.
“That was probably my greatest moment of leverage that we never realized,” White writes. “All of those gifts were received by me and my parents so earnestly. My parents may have even felt badly that a family dispute had led to so many people being concerned about my health.”
White has worked plenty in the years since “Family Matters.” He voiced Sonic the Hedgehog in a series of Sega games; more recently he has had roles in the TV series “The Afterparty” and alongside Adam Sandler in the underrated basketball movie “Hustle” (a shoot he fondly remembers for its pickup hoops games). He knows he’ll always be Urkel to fans of a certain age, but he’s happy when someone on the street recognizes him for something else, like his current gig hosting the CBS game show “Flip Side.” “I’m a game show host now for the Boomers who were calling me Urkel,” he says.
And millennials, who have grown up Googling everything, often call him something else entirely. The name he grew up hearing.
“They call me Jaleel,” he says.