Kevin Hart is not funny.
There. I said it.
Kevin Hart is not funny at all. He is grating AF, marketable, overexposed, professionally frantic and has built a whole empire on being loud enough to be mistaken for hilarious. Y’all know just what I’m talking about. All those bug-eyed reactions, all that damn screaming, the frantic pacing, mugging for the camera, and the constant annoying self-miniaturization. The “I’m short.” “I’m scared.” “My kids are crazy, my wife is mad, my friends are wild.” And all that aggressive sweating until the audience surrenders.
Honestly, I have always wondered if something was wrong with me because I have never found him funny. Kevin Hart can’t even get a warm exhale outta me. But now I realize my brain has taste and is simply refusing to release dopamine for his foolishness. Every time one of his jokes enters my ears, my resentful neurons look around like, “Bytch, absolutely TF not! We are not rewarding this behavior. Change the channel before we trigger a migraine behind your left eyeball. Try us!”
Listen, I am not a comedian, and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m just a snarky writer who has been a nutball since she got past foster care speech delay at age 5 and got an ass whupping that time my adoptive mother read a line in my diary where I wrote that her receding hairline made her look like an old Jewish rabbi. I enjoy the pleasure of my own company, and I take great delight in making myself chuckle while I write.
But I know good humor when I see and hear it. My funny bone has not been colonized. I know about timing and rhythm. I can recognize the architecture of a good joke. I know the difference between wit and noise. And I know that “funny” requires surprise and even danger. Funny requires having a mind sharp enough to cut through the room and show us something true. Kevin Hart does not do this.
And that is why the George Floyd joke at his Netflix roast was so fucked up. Tony Hinchcliffe did not just tell a disgusting joke. He stood on that stage and said, “The Black community is so proud of you . . . right now George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”
Did Y’all hear what this degenerate said? Did you hear the racial theology underneath the joke? “Looking up.” He literally put George Floyd in hell. Beneath him. Stripped of dignity. Burning in eternal damnation. All for a cheap gasp from the audience.
Hinchcliffe wandered into the moral vacancy Kevin Hart’s comedy has been renting out for years. A white comedian looked at a Black man’s roast, saw a Black honoree and a Black cultural moment, and decided the funniest thing he could do was drag George Floyd’s final breaths back onstage. And Kevin Hart sat right there in the center of it all, laughing and letting the machinery roll on, because the one thing his brand cannot survive is a serious moral interruption.
“I can’t breathe” was not standup material, some kind of setup, or punchline. Those desperate words belong to a Black man who was being slowly lynched in public, with a knee on his neck, while he called for his mama. Hearing that and watching the casual cruelty of men who knew they were being watched and still did not care broke something open in many of our souls. As a scholar of lynching and the granddaughter of a man who was hogtied and thrown in the swamps decades ago it broke me. That shit is not comedy. That is a death rattle and a human being’s final appeal to a world that had already decided his pain was negotiable.
There are some things comedy cannot redeem and some horrors you do not “joke” about, especially when the horror is not yours to metabolize. Black death is not a prop. State-sanctioned violence is not a bit and a lynching is not an damn open mic.
Hinchcliffe reaching for “I can’t breathe” wasn’t about “freedom of speech” or being edgy or brave or pushing boundaries. No, this asshole stepped over a corpse, hawk spit on him and called it craft. What kind of sadistic psychopath are you? How can you laugh at the sound of a man being murdered by the state while begging for the most basic thing a human being is born entitled to: air.
And what makes this even more fucked up is that Black folks already had to survive the original trauma, then the constant replaying of the video, then the debates over whether our eyes had deceived us, then the courtroom arguments, then the pundits, then the racists, then the backlash to the protests, then the endless white whining about “law and order.”
And now we are supposed to sit there while some smug-ass little ghoul tries to turn those words into a joke? Absolutely not. My spirit rejects it. My people reject it. Our ancestors reject it and I hope they haunt him, sour his milk, make his breath smell like a vat of cold chitterlings, short-circuit his orgasms, move every chair two inches to the left, and make every punchline he ever writes die in the air before it reaches the cheap seats.
This was Kevin Hart’s roast. His name, platform, Netflix spectacle, and industry coronation. And he left this racist white comedian use his Blackness as a doorway to spit on George Floyd’s grave.
But I’m not even surprised Y’all. Because the problem with Kevin Hart has never been just that he is annoying. Annoying is survivable. Plenty of comedians have tics and plenty of performers are overexposed. Plenty of stars become brands and then become unbearable. The deeper problem is that Kevin Hart’s entire comedic universe is built around making everybody comfortable.
Think about it . . .
His comedy does not threaten power. It does not reveal power. Nor does it disturb power. It performs Blackness in a way that corporate America can digest without choking. He is Black enough to sell, safe enough to sponsor, frantic enough to distract, and harmless enough to franchise. That is the brand. And America loves it because nothing about Kevin Hart asks America to think too hard about itself.
He is not a Richard Pryor who turned pain into prophecy. Or Paul Mooney who kept slicing white supremacy open and letting the pus run out. He is not Bernie Mac walking into the room with grown-man authority and leaving scorch marks on the floor (even though I can’t stand is violent rhetoric toward children). He is not Dave Chappelle at his sharpest, before all the contrarian rot and grievance cosplay swallowed the gift. Kevin Hart is the court jester of racial capitalism, and the court loves him because he will never burn the throne.
That is why the George Floyd joke landed in that room. The room was possible because Kevin Hart’s comedy has always been a safe house for that kind of emptiness. Everybody can laugh. Everybody can “go there.” Everybody can be outrageous. Everybody can traffic in humiliation. Everybody can pretend that nothing is sacred be it Floyd’s murder, the suicide of Sheryl Underwood’s husband, grief, not trauma, or anything that should make a decent person pause before opening their mouth. In that kind of room, the only rule is that somebody else’s pain has to be available for entertainment. Folks can sit their laughing and pretending like their desensitization is sophistication. And the one thing that cannot happen is a moral interruption.
Kevin Hart ain’t shit in this moment. He had a choice to either protect the dignity of a dead Black man or protect the comfort of the industry that keeps rewarding him. He chose the room.
And that choice tells us something about the kind of Black celebrity America rewards most lavishly. It rewards the Black celebrity who can absorb insult without making anybody uncomfortable. It rewards the Black celebrity who can laugh through disrespect and desecration so the rest of the room does not have to feel guilty. It rewards the Black celebrity who knows how to convert humiliation into content and racial insult into just another night in show business.
A few folks have asked me: “Don’t you know what a roast is?” Yes TF I do, and no, the fact that it was a roast does not absolve it. A roast is supposed to punch the person onstage. Kevin Hart was right there. His career was right there. His ego was right there. His scandals were right there. His overexposure was right there. His filmography was right there. His height jokes were right there, tired as they are. His public persona was sitting there begging to be dragged.
Real comedy reveals something, exposes hypocrisy, and disarms power. It finds the absurdity inside the truth and makes us see what we were trained to ignore. But this “roast” was not revelation. We already know America thinks Black death is funny. And we already know white folks can stand over Black bodies and call it order, justice, entertainment, and humor. We already know the country has a long history of gathering around Black suffering and calling it a good time.
Kevin Hart is not funny.
He is a very small man whose whole comic persona depends on shrinking himself into whatever shape the room rewards. He made himself the first joke so nobody would ask him to tell the truth. And when George Floyd’s final heart-wrenching words were dragged onstage, he chose the laugh.
Congrats, sir! The room laughed, the check cleared, and you made massa smile.
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