The Roast of Kevin Hart Gets Roasted

The Roast of Kevin Hart is over — we’re now in the midst of the roast of The Roast of Kevin Hart. The comedians at the center of the staple comedy event, which started on Comedy Central and now is a Netflix heavy hitter, are still dealing with the resulting personal and public fallout. Yesterday, Kevin Hart went on the radio show “The Breakfast Club” to address the criticism he’s received over Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes. Largely, Hart defended Hinchcliffe’s right to make them. “Yeah, the George Floyd joke, it wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience — but our audience that’s watching the roast, if you’re watching the roast, you get why they’re doing it,” Hart said. “You get why the racial humor is on the table. I wasn’t shocked. That’s what they do. Go look at the Tom Brady one. That’s what they do. It happens every year when they do a roast. It’s not a new agenda.” He added, “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe. I don’t expect less. I don’t expect more.”

During the roast, Hinchcliffe told Hart that “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.” In the aftermath of the roast, George Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd went on The Latest With Loren LoRosa and criticized Hart. He called the joke “tasteless” and said Hart should have had “Will Smith energy” to respond to Hinchcliffe.

Hart made it clear he isn’t going to do that. “Whatever the dialogue is, my rebuttal is simplicity,” Hart said. “Remove me from it. I didn’t say it. If you are upset that the night went on, that’s a different conversation. It’s nothing I could do. It’s a production.” He added: “Stop talking as if I said it.” 

Meanwhile, Hinchcliffe has spent his time post-roast smarting from Chelsea Handler’s set, during which she said he uses “Crest White supremacist strips” for his teeth. “It’s the first time I’ve been called a Nazi multiple times in just a few hours,” Hinchcliffe said on his Kill Tony podcast. “I guess that’s L.A. writers’ rooms — a lot of mentally ill liberals out there. Somehow with all these fucking Blacks and Jews and Mexicans around me, I guess I’m a fucking Nazi somehow.” He added that he was not “lit up” by Handler but rather she “just kept coming at” him, which, to Hart’s whole point, is literally what roasts are for.

Handler has criticized both Hinchcliffe’s and host Shane Gillis’s roast sets as racist. “I knew enough about Tony Hinchcliffe’s and Shane’s backgrounds,” she said on Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You podcast on May 20. “I had ex-girlfriends blowing up my DMs that had dated Shane and were telling me stuff about him. So based on that, I was like, ‘Oh, these guys are pretty bad … they’re racist, that they’re bigots, that they’re sexist. They think they’re invincible.” She added that she specifically did not like Gillis joking about lynching. “It was gross,” she said. “I don’t find those jokes to be funny. Lynching is not a joke.” Meanwhile, Gillis hasn’t responded to anything about the roast publicly. Maybe his smartest move yet.