Kevin Hart sat down with “The Breakfast Club” to address the most controversial moment from his Netflix roast, and he came with a clear position: he is not taking responsibility for what Tony Hinchcliffe said.
As theGrio previously reported, Terrence Floyd appeared on The Breakfast Club and said Hart, who attended his brother’s funeral, should have stopped the joke the moment it left Hinchcliffe’s mouth, and Floyd’s family and the Gianna and George Floyd Foundation called Hart’s response “sad for the culture”. The conversation on The Breakfast Club gave Hart his most direct platform yet to push back on those calls.
“It wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” Hart said of the fallout from Hinchcliffe’s set. “But our audience that’s watching the roasts, if you’re watching the roasts, you get why they’re doing it.” He acknowledged the joke landed badly, but drew a line around what he believes is his responsibility as producer. “F—k that joke. We move on,” he said. “I don’t understand why we stand on a hill and it becomes like this big thing.”
Hart revealed that after the roast, he personally called Stephen Jackson, one of George Floyd’s closest friends, to explain the context of roast comedy. “Let me call the one person after,” Hart said he told himself. “Stack, hey, Tony threw one out there. It’s this and this, but you do know that that’s what this s—t is as a roast, but I just want you to know from my side, that man is on his own.” Hart said that Jackson told him he understood.
When the hosts pushed Hart on whether he felt he needed to do more publicly, he resisted. “I don’t f—king need to prove to people that I give a f—k,” he said. “If you open that door, then that’s the door that people expect.” He framed the situation using a nightclub analogy, saying that if two people were shot at an event with his name attached, the headline would still read “Kevin Hart’s party.” “I didn’t shoot the gun,” he said. “Why am I arguing? Why am I doing interviews after?”
On the criticism specifically, he was direct about where his accountability ends. “Remove me from it. I didn’t say it,” Hart said. “The job at hand was to produce a successful roast, which I did. I also got the rebuttal. I also got to say s—t at the end. What are we dealing with here?”
