Joe and 22 end up returning to Earth, however 22 ends up in Joe's body, while Joe ends up in his therapy cat's body. However, 22 grudgingly helps him “get back”, telling Joe that he “talks too much” when he questions her about why she was helping him. When he fails to be a good mentor he is about to be sent to the Great Beyond. Not wanting his life to be over when his big break is about to come, he refuses to go to the Great Beyond and volunteers to be a mentor to 22. When he finally got his big break he fell down a manhole and got into a coma. He became a teacher for the middle school band, and he was first shown encouraging Connie, who was playing the trombone after the class laughed at her. Since then, he has aspired to be a successful jazz musician but wasn't able to get his big break. When Joe was a young boy, his father took him to a jazz club where he found his passion for music. He wears a grey fedora, a black sweater, brown pants, and red shoes.Īs a soul, his nose is not featured, but his glasses and fedora are now part of him. Joe was originally depicted as an actor who gets his big break on Broadway, but the filmmakers switched him to being a jazz musician due to it having more pathos.Īs a human, he is African-American with a black mustache and has black thick-rimmed glasses. Kemp Powers and John Baptiste gave input on how Joe should act around his students and what he should say with much of his dialogue taken almost verbatim from Baptiste. When going through rewrites, the team realized that it made Joe unlikable. Now with 22's help, he must find his way back to his body and thus wake up from the coma, before time runs out and he fully dies.Įarlier versions of the film depicted Joe as being much more cynical to his students and openly voicing his opinion of how they view themselves. There, he meets a soul with a dim view of life named 22, who he finds himself mentoring. This put him in a coma, a state where he is neither alive nor dead, thus sending his soul to The Land of the Dead and, later, escaping to the The Great Before (both being places between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead). As he was celebrating his new gig, he accidentally fell down a manhole. Joe Gardner is a middle school band teacher who has long dreamed of performing jazz music onstage and finally gets a chance after impressing two other jazz musicians during an opening act at the Half Note Club. That is, until a single unexpected step sends him to the cosmic realms where he finds the “You Seminar” and is forced to think again about what his life is all about. He lives alone, immersing himself in what he loves best: music.
Joe has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history, and even if his passion for music may have hampered his social life over the years, it hasn’t hampered his confidence. Joe believes he was born to play professionally, and though he’s 46 years old, he feels his opportunity to land a high-profile gig could come any day. While teaching is a noble profession, his true passion is playing jazz, and he’s good. A middle-school band teacher, Joe Gardner’s life hasn’t quite gone the way he’s expected.
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