When I first heard about comedians Mike Epps and Kevin Hart “clashing” with each other on social media, I figured it was a good-hearted fake beef that makes for fantastic content, like how Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon have been coming at each other’s necks forever.
But apparently, they’ve reignited a real feud that I didn’t know existed before right now. Their mutual sentiment for each other is apparently, “I love you, but you ain’t shit.” Only without the “I love you” part.
The ‘Beef’
The latest dustup started over a post from Instagram account @comedyhype, which addressed comments Epps recently made about Hart in the comments section of another Instagram post, to which Hart apparently clapped back.
Epps hopped in the comments section of this post in an apparent attempt to diffuse the whole thing, but Hart had a bit of time that day and neither comedian seemed to have a grammar book on hand.
Any suggestion that it’s all love went out the door when Hart wrote, “All I can say is that your (sic) a sad individual.” And Epps’ response “You seem to be a great person… but I stilll (sic) don’t think yo ass funny” is the equivalent of your boss saying that you were cool to hang out with in the cafeteria right before they fire you. If they ever run into each other in public, their entourages are totally gonna scrap.
For some reason, Nick Cannon Carey decided to hop his cornball ass in the mix with some Joel Osteen-ass opinions he could’ve kept to himself. Epps baked him instantly, which made the whole interaction worth it.
Zero-Sum Game
Far as I’m concerned, we can usher all these fools to the other side of the Wall to deal with the White Walkers. The only thing stupider than Twitter beef is Instagram beef. We hit up IG to see Flat Tummy Tea-hawking bikini models work the same four poses and who did the best #InMyFeelingsChallenge.
We don’t go to see 40-something n—– with kids bitching at each other like schoolchildren. Epps had no good reason to be publicly petty, and Hart shouldn’t have taken the bait. In the estimable words of the late, great Prodigy: “You’re like a comment on IG…nobody cares.”
The original @comedyhype post has Twitter weighing in on who among the two is the better comedian, which I can’t honestly answer considering both have been circling the drain of mediocrity for years. Hart is basically the comedian version of The Migos: He’ll spend his entire career making crowd-pleasing comedy that takes almost none of the risks his idols and forebears took, and he’ll continue being handsomely rewarded for it.
Epps is the black Will Ferrell: dude entered comedy with a bang and spent years proving that he has no actual range (when was the last belly laugh you had at something Epps did or said?). And, just because he got involved, Cannon is about as funny as Donald Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee.
If any of these men have the one-up here, it’s Hart: His business acumen is so dope that he’s convinced Hollywood to pay him many millions of dollars to play the same damn role – the funny, plucky yet determined pint-sized sidekick to a larger straight man – over and over again. He’s as dependable as a Tyler Perry plotline.
Their successes make the whole “beef” thing more absurd: Both of these fools are rich men who could likely retire right now and be set for life while the rest of us are thinking about how we’re gonna stunt with next year’s tax returns. As is the case with many rap beefs, they’re probably better off teaming up and securing the bag together.
In the meantime, I’m sure they’ll keep flexing their Twitter fingers and running afoul of the one message I worked to convey to my students for the 12 seconds I taught high schoolers: You won’t get far in life and career if your writing is full of errors.
Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.