When This Is It came out in 2009, everybody expected to be sad. It was built from roughly 80 hours of rehearsal footage filmed in the weeks before Michael Jackson died, and nobody had ever intended it to be a film at all. What surprised people was how much of it is genuinely funny. Critics reviewing it on television ended up laughing all the way through. For the first time in years, the world got to see a man who was relaxed, silly, bossy in a nice way, and constantly cracking jokes at his own band.
During “The Way You Make Me Feel,” the band comes in too early and stops the song dead. Michael spins around, looks at them, and delivers the line that has become a fan favorite: “One more time… you really turn… that’s why we have rehearsal!” He is not angry. He is delighted. He gets to say the thing every boss dreams of saying.
Michael Jackson This Is It funniest moments rehearsal
Then there is the way he gave notes to musicians. He could not read music and had no notation to point at, so when something was not right, he performed the correction at them. In the middle of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” he stops and tells the band the part is “funkier, I’m not feeling that part enough” — and then beatboxes the bassline at them with his own mouth until they understand exactly what he means.
The politeness is the funniest thing about it all. Every criticism arrives wrapped in about four layers of apology. One of his band members described it afterward: Michael seemed genuinely worried about hurting the crew’s feelings before giving any note at all. “That is how he was,” he said. “All love.”
Michael Jackson – “That’s why we rehearse!”
Which brings us to the ear line. During the Jackson 5 medley, he stops and tries to explain that something is wrong with the sound, and what he comes out with is: it feels like someone is shoving their fist into my ear.
He was not being dramatic. There is a genuine technical explanation. For his entire career, Michael had performed with stage monitors — enormous speakers pointed at him, cranked up to over 100 decibels — because he liked to feel the bass in his body as he danced. For This Is It they had switched him to in-ear monitors, tiny earpieces that block out everything else. He had never used them before in his life, and by his band’s own account he walked into rehearsal, stuck them in and started singing. No wonder it felt like a fist.
And the moment fans love best about that exchange is what happened next. Michael carefully explains the whole problem, in detail, asking them to take it down a little. Then the director, Kenny Ortega, asks him to say it all again — because he could not hear him.
There are dozens of others. He sings “water, water” at the end of “Billie Jean” for no obvious reason. He does an arm-waving move in “Human Nature” that nobody has ever been able to explain. And when he suddenly sings a line in Spanish, Ortega gets so excited that Michael goes visibly shy about it.
None of it was meant for us. It was working footage, shot so the team could review the staging. Which is exactly why it is the most relaxed anybody had seen him in twenty years.