Kevin Hart’s Funny Business
Proceed past a tan stucco security booth in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, into one of the neighborhood’s opulent gated communities, and find the large house on the left with the black Mercedes SLS AMG out front, its gull-wing doors raised in an ostentatious overhead greeting. Pause to admire the white Ferrari 458 Spider in front of it, which, like the SLS, is being washed and waxed on this blazing June day by a team of guys in matching gray polo shirts. Walk up the home’s stone pathway, through the heavy wooden front doors, and try not to stumble over the luggage — Goyard, Vuitton, Givenchy — piled in the marble-floored foyer. Wave to the saleswoman from Cartier, who’s made a house call with an array of Love Bracelets and other jewelry in tow. Pause to take in the cascading arrangement of fake flowers in the entryway, and let your gaze move upward along either of the two wrought-iron staircases to the second-floor landing, where an oil painting depicts a short man and a beautiful woman gazing down happily at the Vegas Strip. The short man is Kevin Hart, the hottest stand-up comic in America.
This is his home. Here comes Hart now, wearing furry slippers, distressed jean shorts and, around his neck, two likenesses of Jesus Christ pimpled with diamonds and swinging from gold chains. And here’s the woman from the painting — Hart’s fiancee, Eniko Parrish — wearing tiny blue sweatshorts and a tank top with Bob Marley’s face across the front. She’s riding a $1,500 motorized plastic plank called a PhunkeeDuck across the dining-room floor. There are several large portraits of Hart’s heroes on the walls: Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle, Jimi Hendrix. “We good, Giselle?” Hart calls over to the Cartier lady. “It’ll be just a moment more — thank you,” she replies, awaiting payment authorization. Hart, 36, and Parrish have a thing for Cartier’s Love Bracelets, marketed as sharable between romantic partners, and Hart has bought enough of them — straightforward yellow-gold ones, which start at $4,500 apiece; more elaborate ones with diamond settings, which start at $40,000 — that Cartier gladly dispatches its employees directly to him. Today, Giselle also brought examples of another model, the Juste Un Clou, which resembles a long nail curved into a hoop. One, in diamond-studded white gold, catches Hart’s eye: MSRP $47,000. He adds it to the bill. “I’m still waiting for you to buy a watch from me one day!” Giselle tells Hart.
This is the life Kevin Hart long dreamed of. He dreamed about it when he was a kid growing up in Philadelphia — his sleeping quarters a bunk bed squeezed into the hallway of the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his single mom and older brother — and he dreamed about it when he was a fledgling road comic, putting thousands of miles on rental cars and his then-girlfriend’s Grand Cherokee, zigzagging between crappy bookings. Hart has been a comedian since his late teens, but over the past several years he’s drawn ever-larger crowds into ever-larger rooms — first theaters, then arenas, and at the end of August, an NFL stadium. His current tour, What Now, which cost him “something like 7, $8 million” to produce, involves an enormous configuration of video screens, travels around on eight tractor-trailers and is on track to become the highest-grossing comedy tour of all time. When he passed through New York, in July, he played three nights at Madison Square Garden and another night at the Barclays Center — the kind of rooms, as his business partner Jeff Clanagan puts it, “that Beyoncé and Jay Z play together, or Jay and Kanye — and he’s playing them all by himself.”
A virtuosic, hypercharged performer, Hart doesn’t unfurl punchlines so much as long yarns about crazy relatives (in Hart’s onstage depiction, his dad is a former drug addict with an arsenal of colorful catchphrases); about striving to overcome his own flaws (infidelity); and about one ludicrous indignity after the next. In one beloved bit, an ex-con dressed up as SpongeBob SquarePants terrorizes Hart at a children’s birthday party. “Nobody told me that SpongeBob was fresh out!” Hart protests. “This nigga was fresh out of jail!” In another, he tries to hit on women while driving, only to realize that his kids’ car seats are visible in the back seat, draining away his swagger. He’s able to pivot smoothly from jokes that could fit into a family-friendly sitcom (the time he found himself stuck atop a runaway horse, his legs too short to reach the stirrups) to goofball surrealism (he insists a raccoon that lives near his house has repeatedly threatened to shoot him) to flashes of acid-tongued misanthropy (the bit where he tells an imposing fan at an airport, “Kill yourself — die”).
Hart’s most distinguishing trait as a stand-up, though, is how he combines all this with over-the-top spectacle, carrying on in the bombastic tradition of the Eddie Murphy he first saw in Raw — a vision of leather-clad black bravado that thrilled Hart in his youth. “He was my generation’s, like, ‘Holy shit, this guy is unbelievable‘ — people fall at his feet, everything he says is golden.” Hart takes stages via hidden elevators and catapults. He wears bespoke jackets, designer high-tops and tons of jewelry. His mic stand is gold. In 2013, Hart gave a theatrical release to his stand-up concert Let Me Explain, which featured enormous Metallica-style columns of fire bursting from the stage — he sank $2.5 million into the project, cut a deal with theater chains, then reaped $32 million in box-office returns. Describing the upcoming What Now film, Hart says, “It’s not a concert film — it’s an action movie.”
Meanwhile, he’s parlayed his stage success into big TV hosting gigs (Saturday Night Live, MTV’s Video Music Awards) and blockbuster comedies (Ride Along, The Wedding Ringer). He landed in L.A. at 7:30 this morning from Boston, where he’s shooting a new film with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He’ll fly back to the set on a private jet tonight, after performing What Now for a sold-out crowd at the Staples Center. “You wouldn’t believe how many people have hit me up for tickets today,” he says. His ex-wife and the mother of his kids, Torrei Hart, is coming. Jeffrey Katzenberg will be backstage to say hello. Floyd Mayweather says he’s coming too.
“I don’t give a shit about critical consensus! They poll people after my movies, and I get A’s. When I get an F, I’ll take criticism.”
Kevin Hart’s Funny Business, Page 1 of 9