The Kevin Hart Question: Will He Walk Away From Stand Up At the Height of His Success?

kevin hart

Burning Out on a High Note: Will Hart Follow the Examples of Some of Stand Up’s Greatest Performers, and Walk Away?

Starting in April of 2016, Kevin Hart, one of the most popular standup comedians in the world today, has publicly floated the possibility he may soon step away from standup comedy, possibly forever. This isn’t the first time someone appeared to be on top of the comedy world and ostensibly decided to give it all away—Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, and plenty of other comedians on a much smaller scale seemed to step away from the medium at a time they were exposed to their widest audiences ever, despite being well away from retirement age. Of course, most of those comedians eventually came back to stand up, at least in some form, for some time, and Kevin Hart’s announcement shows him following that same path of greatness, whether or not he deserves to be placed amongst such idols.

Although there have been a few exceptions, entertainment history hasn’t seen many performers stake their claim in stand up and nothing else. The closest we have today is Louis C.K., and that’s an immediately absurd statement, considering Louis helms at least two TV shows and acts in countless movie roles in addition to his incredible work ethic as a comic. In the past, there was George Carlin and Richard Pryor, but they too at least occasionally attempted a TV or film role, Pryor more than Carlin, that could have gotten in the way of their stand-up if they became successful enough. Far more comedians take the path Hart is taking, and in the same sense that all artists are inevitably influenced by the most successful artists to come before them, it’s possible to explain this pattern by looking at possibly the first and arguably the most successful comedian to go on this journey: Steve Martin.

There have been countless stand-up comedians since, and some have been monstrously successful, but it’s still possible no mere stand-up ever reached the heights hit by Steve Martin in the late 1970’s. Critical perception of his act was almost universally positive, but that in no way compared to the legions of rabid fans screaming his punch lines with the same goofy energy as the man who wrote them, while that man was performing sold-out shows to massive audiences around the United States. As his star grew and grew and he received more and more movie roles, stand-up took the back-burner in Martin’s career, and before long he’d completely stopped performing without so much as an official announcement.

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It’s easy to look at Martin’s early example and all of those that followed and frame the decision to leave stand-up behind as a very practical one. Regardless of how successful a stand-up comedian gets, earnings from stand up would never come near the financial windfall afforded to movie or TV stars, so leaving stand-up behind as the film roles start to pour in seems like a cut-and-dry business decision. In actuality, it’s a whole lot more than that. Stand-up comedy isn’t just a day (or night) job that comedians forget about during the other 23-plus hours of their day. In a very real way, being a stand-up comedian is a way of life.

Every profession in the world has their in-jokes about how people within that profession think differently than people outside of it, but there’s nowhere that’s more true than in stand-up, where thinking differently is the entire point.

Every profession in the world has their in-jokes about how people within that profession think differently than people outside of it, but there’s nowhere that’s more true than in stand-up, where thinking differently (and hopefully comically) is the entire point. Comedians can’t just think differently though—they need to think differently about universal themes and concepts, or at least that’s what they need to think about in order to become famous. All of the major examples followed this trend—Seinfeld’s entire point was that he was talking about bullshit everybody notices, but can’t put into words. Steve Martin took “showbiz shtick” to its ultimate conclusion, making the idea of putting on an act part of the act. Robin Williams talked about personal problems in a loudly hilarious manner that forced people to listen. They seem like wildly different topics, and they are, but they still manage to be universal once audiences notice them, with the only twist in these cases being the person engaging them happens to be a comic genius.

While these other comics took universal themes and added brilliant commentary and punch lines, Kevin Hart tells stories about his not particularly extraordinary or noteworthy childhood. The stories are well delivered, but if you didn’t have a similar upbringing to him, chances are, you aren’t going to understand why anything he says was funny, or at least that has been my experience. Nonetheless, he manages to resonate with millions of people who do deeply understand and enjoy Hart’s stories, so much so they’ve caused him to transcend the medium like the legends before him. When that happens, it’s always only a matter of time before the comedian “transcends,” or at least leaves, reality itself.

The more famous and successful a comedian becomes, the less they are even capable of engaging with that level of reality they became famous for thinking differently about. Plenty of people have accused celebrities in general of living in their own worlds, and it’s somewhat undeniable they do, whether intentionally or not. Jerry Seinfeld couldn’t think up new jokes about buttons on t-shirts when he was making millions of dollars every day by performing multiple jobs on his TV show. Robin Williams might have been doing more and more cocaine as he got more and more famous, but at times he stopped being able to stand still and talk about it like a normal human, too busy being torn from film to film and studio to studio to piece together a coherent act. And now Kevin Hart doesn’t have time to relax and spend time with his family, which is where the majority of his jokes came from.

Looking at where the material comes from brings up an interesting point about Kevin Hart—he’s not nearly as clever or as universally beloved as the other comedians I’ve mentioned thus far. While the others were groundbreaking and unique, Hart is by-and-large just another comedian screaming stories at an audience with such impeccable timing it’s apparently pretty easy to confuse his pauses for punch lines. He’s not special in any way outside of his success, but that’s why he’s such an integral piece of evidence in the theory that any stand-up who becomes successful enough will eventually quit. It isn’t an issue of artistic integrity, it isn’t a willful decision to make more money (at least that’s not all it is), and it isn’t simply some kind of creative burn out—these comics are becoming too famous to be people, and while an actor can be hilarious by being outlandishly fake, the whole point of stand-up comedy is the oft quoted aphorism “it’s funny because it’s true.”

Eventually, nearly all of these comedians come back to “the truth” as it were, and start being funny by themselves again. Most examples only require a minor dip in their fame or critical standing before deciding to run back to stand-up and prove they still had it. Even Steve Martin, the sterling example of a comedian stepping away from the spotlight while on top, recently returned to stand-up in 2016 to open for Seinfeld. As it would turn out, you can take the comedian away from reality, but you can’t take reality away from the comedian, and once they’re allowed to re-engage with it, they’ll start making it hilarious once again.

One can question if Kevin Hart ever made reality as funny as Jerry Seinfeld, or as Steve Martin, or as Eddie Murphy. He probably hasn’t, but his millions of fans think he has. Regardless, by starring in bad film after bad film, he isn’t in reality anymore, he’s in Hollywood. Now, his fans are forced to make what might be a difficult choice: do they go and see his movies, driving him further away from reality and from stand-up, or do they protest the flicks and hope he one day comes back to what made him popular? Either way, we predict he’ll come back to stand-up eventually, he just needs to start building up a few more relatable, true life stories before he does so—and he won’t be able to do that until he gets far away from the big screen.

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Lucas Wesley Snipes is a writer, improviser, and standup comedian living in Los Angeles. He is also a trained trapeze artist, which he loves telling people.
Lucas Wesley Snipes
Lucas Wesley Snipes
Lucas Wesley Snipes is a writer, improviser, and standup comedian living in Los Angeles. He is also a trained trapeze artist, which he loves telling people.