Kevin Hart Still Doesn’t Get It
By: Marques Wilson
Tags: Kevin Hart, Masculinity, Feminism, LGBT, Black

Well… the dust has fallen from yet another internet controversy from our most defensive yet unapologetic comedian.

Kevin Hart received backlash from Black women over a joke he made in his Netflix special Zero F**** Given about his 15-year-old daughter.

He explains that she likes several boys at a time and changes her mind about her crushes often. He then says that she exhibits “hoe activity”…

I admittedly enjoy risky humor and generally give comedians a lot of room to make jokes that people may think are not politically correct, or even meanspirited. However, I’ll never find humor in a grown man publicly referencing his daughter’s sexuality for laughs… ever.

On the social app Clubhouse, these comments pushed Hart’s critics to ask this question: Is Kevin Hart funny?

Short answer: Not really. But, Hart decided to enter this platform and face the criticism head-on (while also promoting his special). He failed to meaningfully engage with the concerns of the Black women in the discussion and also gaslights them in the process as he fails to acknowledge the greater context of his joke. For this reason, a continued dive into Kevin Hart’s humor is warranted.

The end of 2018 marked the first of Kevin Hart’s controversies. After he was announced as the host of the upcoming Oscars celebration, old homophobic tweets resurfaced and one comment in particular raised eyebrows from one of his early comedy specials. In the special, Hart jokes about breaking his daughter’s dollhouse over his son’s head if he saw his son ever play with it because he doesn’t want his son to be gay.

Instead of being an adult and offering a simple apology for the comments, Hart chose to defend himself. He claimed that he’d evolved since those comments as they were years ago but ultimately chooses to turn down his dream job because he’d rather not admit wrongdoing and acknowledge that his words were harmful. Later, he quotes MLK in an even stranger attempt to position himself as a victim of censorship by the sensitive, radicalized, woke internet minority.

Almost a year later, he sat across from a then 20-year-old Lil Nas X on HBO’s The Shop: Uninterrupted. The rap star speaks candidly about making the bold decision to come out as a member of the LGBT community at the start of his career. Kevin Hart then interrupts him with feigned confusion: “Why? So what, you’re gay?”

The man who jokes about using corporal punishment on his son for playing with girl toys now doesn’t understand the cultural significance and sheer bravery of a young, successful Black man in hip hop coming out in front of millions of people.

My purpose in bringing up these controversies is not to single out Kevin Hart as some avatar for everything wrong with Black masculinity in America. After all, he is just an entertainer whose content none of us have to tune into. He also has the difficult job of being a comedian, one of the riskiest art forms in the era of viral videos and Twitter commentary. Many Black male celebrities have faced similar backlash, for instance, T.I. when choosing to speak about his daughter’s hymen on a podcast.

The landscape of Kevin Hart’s comments however reveals many truths of toxic masculinity. Of course, this is not by coincidence. Whether Hart does this intentionally or not, Black masculinity has often been a central joke in his act as a short Black man. Especially early in his career, he would mimic a kid’s voice and lean heavily into short jokes. Portraying himself as a small and completely unserious man is humorous in its opposition to ideals of hypermasculine Black manhood.

Many comedians use self-deprecation. When executed well, it can help the audience get comfortable and relate to the comedian. When Black men watch Kevin Hart they understand the truth that Black men in the real world are not perceived as harmless as Hart presents, and that the childish profile that Hart invites you to laugh at is not one that you aspire to be like. (Hart’s wit and talent in hitting these notes in his act have made him rich and famous off stage which of course outweighs any perceived lack of manliness.)

Kevin Hart’s humor leans into homophobia and misogyny because, well, these themes are natural tie-ins for the people who think “little man” jokes are funny. When we watch Hart, we also see someone who does not fit into the ideals of toxic Black masculinity ultimately reinforcing them by pointing to its biggest victims: Black women and Black LGBT people.

And here lies the problem. We all understand that these are jokes. We aren’t critiquing Hart because we are “offended”, we do because the truths that these jokes point to are very real and not very funny. We know that Kevin didn’t make the joke about hitting his son over the head with a dollhouse because that’s what he does at home, he said it because he knows the rhetoric within Black communities about gay and effeminate men will allow people to find the joke funny. Black LGBT folks are far too familiar with the heartbreaking and violent consequences of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric.

We also understand that Hart didn’t say that his daughter was exhibiting “hoe activity” because he intends to embarrass her or because he thinks that she is in fact a hoe. He said it because he (and his audience) is aware of the man’s role in defining and policing female sexuality. Women from puberty onward are shown the consequences of our culture’s failure to promote healthy and equitable gender socialization around sex, as well as the social pressure (and confusion) of the “good girl or hoe” dichotomy that is presented in the culture.

Kevin Hart and his supporters don’t get that critics aren’t fighting for a world where no one can tell a joke and everything must be tailored to the most “sensitive” liberal audience. What we really want is a culture that no longer finds these harmful and regressive perspectives of gender and sexuality funny. Because they’re actually poisonous.

In response to the backlash over the comments and appearance on Clubhouse, Hart posted a video on Instagram, offering a defense with the following caption:

…..THIS IS NOT AN APOLOGY….this is common sense…..also THIS IS WHY I MADE THIS SPECIAL!!!! This is why….now go stream that bitch!!!!! Let’s goooooo #ItsComedyNotPolitics

Obviously, no one who really “gives zero f****” would need to explain and defend themselves as much as Kevin Hart does. But what we really need to highlight here is the closer: #ItsComedyNotPolitics. Is hard to tell if Hart is being dishonest, or he really doesn’t get that comedy is a commentary on society and politics inform what our society is and the direction in which it’s going. After years of backlash over his jokes, Kevin just doesn’t get it. He needs to face the fact that he either needs to evolve or live up to his aspirations and actually give no f****.