Trevor Noah believes the Kevin Hart roast had one fatal flaw.
Discussing the Netflix special on his What Now? podcast with co-host Eugene Khoza and former CNN anchor Don Lemon, the former Daily Show host said, “I had too many feelings about the Kevin Hart roast.”
“I felt like it was weird that all the Black comedians who came on stage told jokes about the people who were there, but then a lot of the white comedians who came on told jokes about Black people,” Noah explained. “I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. I thought it was The Roast of Kevin Hart.”
Noah’s comments sum up much of the outcry following May’s Netflix special, which was hosted by MAGA-friendly comic Shane Gillis and featured roasts from Donald Trump fan Tony Hinchcliffe, as well as Chelsea Handler, Sheryl Underwood, Katt Williams, Jeff Ross, and Regina Hall.
Hinchcliffe and Gillis’ jokes from the stage drew the most backlash, particularly Hinchcliffe’s comment that murdered Minnesota man George Floyd was “looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.” Gillis joked that Hart was so short, “You’d have to lynch him from a bonsai tree.”
“You’re like, but what does George Floyd have to—I don’t even understand the connecting thread between George Floyd and Kevin Hart,” Noah said.
Gillis’ lynching joke drew a very different reaction from him, however. “Here’s a joke that I thought could be construed as racist, but I think was also extremely funny,” Noah said.
“Jokewise, I think that’s phenomenal. I think it’s funny because… what it is doing in the joke is a very funny thing. Now, lynching is not funny. Slavery is not funny. All these things are not funny,” he went on. “But that’s not the job. The job of comedy is to find funny in what’s not funny.”
On the whole, Noah praised the special for eliciting a reaction from its audience—and there certainly was a loud one. Several comedians slammed the jokes made by Hinchcliffe and Gillis, and Floyd’s family launched a petition demanding that the event’s proceeds be donated to the charity founded in his honor.
Hart defended the controversial jokes on The Breakfast Club last month. “The George Floyd joke, it wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” he said. “But our audience that’s watching the roast, if you’re watching the roast, you get why they’re doing it. You get why the racial humor is on the table. Like, it’s not... I wasn’t shocked.”
On Thursday, Noah ultimately applauded the roast for making people “feel something,” adding, “People responded to it. Maybe I’m starved of authenticity so much that that’s all I focused on.”
