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ENTERTAINMENT: Kevin Hart Steps Down as 2019 Oscars Host, Here's Why

Following his announcement that he would be hosting the 2019 Oscars earlier this week, Kevin Hart has shared that he will no longer be hosting the ceremony. On Thursday night, the comedian came forward with this news, after refusing to apologize for anti-gay tweets and sentiments that resurfaced via social media. The tweets have been deleted, but screenshots circulating, feature distasteful language including anti-gay language.

Hart took to Instagram to address the controversy. In a video, he refused to apologize for the homophobic sentiments. In the video he told viewers to “stop searching for reason to be angry” and even added, “You LIVE and YOU LEARN & GROW & YOU MATURE.” Later, the Academy gave him an ultimatum which was to either “Apologize for his old tweets or step down as Oscars host.”

Hart’s stepping down statement on Twitter read:

“I passed. The reason I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times. This is not the first time this has come up. Regardless, to the Academy, I’m thankful for the opportunity, if it goes away, no harm, no foul.”

The 91st Academy Awards are slated to air on February 25, 2019. At the moment, it’s not certain who will host the ceremony. Stay tuned as more news emerges.

Source

Hollywood Reporter

NEW ENTERTAINMENT:

The King of Underground Comedy is back and ready to exercise the right to speak his mind. Great America premieres January 16 on Netflix.

Atlanta Robbin’ Season, the next season of the acclaimed and award-winning comedy series, will premiere on FX on Thursday, March 1, 2018 at 10 pm ET/PT. In Atlanta Robbin’ Season, two cousins work through the Atlanta music scene in order to better their lives and the lives of their families.

Her story begins where her life ends. Who murdered Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone), the famed children’s author? The five-night limited series premieres January 22, on HBO.

In this scene form MOST EXPENSIVEST, 2 Chainz tries out the most expensive driving range suite with his friend Vic Mensa.

DAVE CHAPPELLE ON EBRO

 

Dave Chappelle Stops by Hot 97 to talk about new dates for his tour, reflects on Charlie Murphy’s death and recent Hip Hop albums

COMEDY: DAVE CHAPPELLE & DONNELL RAWLINGS / Trailer: Insecure Season 2

         

Dave Chappelle On Bill Cosby, Charlie Murphy, Being Non-Apologetic & Much More

         

Insecure returns Sunday, July 23 at 10:30. Starring Issa Rae, Yvonne Orji and Jay Ellis, the hit comedy series follows three Los Angeles natives as they navigate the insecurities and all-too-real ups and downs of their personal and professional lives.

RIP CHARLIE MURPHY

Charlie Murphy, the beloved comedian, writer and older brother of Eddie Murphy, has died after a battle with leukemia. He was 57. The funnyman passed away Wednesday morning at a New York City hospital, TMZ reported, citing his manager. He had been undergoing chemotherapy Murphy earned a tremendous fan base as a writer for “Chappelle’s Show,” on which he frequently appeared in sketches alongside star Dave Chappelle.
He had a recurring segment on the Comedy Central series called “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories,” which featured him comically recalling his unfortunate interactions with major 1980s stars such as Prince and Rick James when he was a member of his brother’s crew. The Prince sketch was particularly memorable and detailed a pick-up basketball game where the pop icon (played by Chappelle) and his team beat Murphy’s. Prince later revealed the game did in fact take place, telling MTV that “the whupping is true.”
Murphy, who was Eddie’s only sibling, teamed up with the “Saturday Night Live” alum as a writer for several of his movies, including “Norbit.”He also appeared in front of the camera for many movie and TV roles outside of his work with Chappelle, including recurring gigs on “Are We There Yet?” and “The Boondocks,” and had a lengthy touring career as a stand-up comic as well.
Murphy’s wife, Tisha Taylor Murphy, died in 2009 after a lengthy battle with cancer. The couple married in 1997 and had two kids together: daughter Ava and son Xavier. Murphy also had another child from a previous relationship. Murphy’s death rocked the entertainment world and led to an outpour of condolences from many of the comedian’s friends and admirers.
“We just lost one of the funniest most real brothers of all time,” Chris Rock tweeted. “Charlie Murphy RIP.”
Russell Simmons shared a similar sentiment. “Just came out of meditation and learned that one of my friends and my biggest comedy idol passed,” he wrote. “Damn I loved Charlie Murphy.”
Source: Daily News

ENTERTAINMENT: Kevin Hart aka Chocolate Droppa In The Studio With Metro Boomin / Vanilla Wafer vs Chocolate Droppa

                       

Am not here to play games people chocolate Droppa is back.
                       

So Nick Jonas thought Droppa only battled rappers… WRONG!! He found out the hard way that Droppa is still undefeated #DroppaVsEverybody

RIP Gene Wilder Was a True Cult Classic and a Dreamer of Dreams A fond farewell and thank you to a true original.

2016 has added yet another beautiful name to its ever-climbing list of celebrity deaths – Gene Wilder is gone. Wilder passed away from complications he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 83, having kept his affliction a secret for the last three years of his life. Wilder’s nephew cited that the actor of screen and stage “simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world.” He leaves behind a family, a legacy, and a filmography chock-full of classics, all of which challenged Hollywood and inspired audiences to explore the inner, infinite bounds of their imagination.
My first exposure to Gene Wilder came when I was 11 years old. I had recently been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and was admitted to a hospital for upwards of three weeks. I spent the first week of my stay in the sterile hallways of Moscow’s European Medical Center hooked up to IVs of saline and insulin, beeping and booping my way through ketoacidosis, unable to stomach solid food. If you can imagine anything more grim and sterile than a hospital, try a Russian hospital: stern, stone-faced nurses would try to lift my spirits as they pricked my fingers, testing my blood sugar as it slowly, sluggishly stabilized.
My father spent the entire three-week stint by my side, working and sleeping in a parallel bed, typing away vigorously at one of those blocky, black IBM ThinkPads that lawyers still use these days. Naturally, after the third day or so, my dad and I started to get stir-crazy. There is, after all, only so much conversation you can make with a sick and grumpy 11-year-old who hasn’t kept a meal down in months. Finally, my dad returned from one of his rare visits home with a haul of movies for us to watch on the hospital’s much-too-bulky TV set.
The first movie he popped into the TV’s relic of a VHS player was Young Frankenstein.
There’s a time-honored tradition of children automatically disliking everything that their parents show them as they’re growing up, only to have the truth dawn on them too late. I felt the same way about Prince a couple years later when my dad pressed play on Purple Rain. How could a lithe black man possibly shred a guitar the way my father said he could? By extension, how could a black-and-white film about Frankenstein possibly lighten me up when I was so heavy with water-weight?

The fact of the matter is that Young Frankenstein could pull laughs from a cadaver, let alone a sick kid and his father. We doubled over laughing at the misadventures of Froderick Fronkensteen, Eyegor and Fraublücher—insert horse whinny here; lines like “Put…ze candle…BACK,” “a roll in ze hay” and “nice hopping” are perennial quotables in my household, as I’m sure they are in countless families around the globe. As soon as the credits rolled on Young Frankenstein, we had two options: we could switch to Blazing Saddles or we would rewind the tape and rewatch Young Frankenstein from the top. Oftentimes, we did both.
Wilder’s career is one of cult classics: Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, while beloved by comedic buffs like my dad, were far from mainstream successes. Ditto goes for Wilder’s debut in Mel Brooks’s The Producers – while Wilder did garner an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor, it was not until his role in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) that he garnered some mainstream recognition. His four films with Richard Pryor—Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You—are all legendary and pioneering in their own right, but far from the mainstream comedic canon. After the loss of his beloved wife, Gilda Radnor to cancer, Wilder retreated from the spotlight, focusing instead on directorial efforts and writing novels. He told reporters, “I like show but I don’t like the business.” The fact that Wilder openly derided Tim Burton’s remake of Willy Wonka and refused to see the film speaks volumes of his integrity as an artist who would not stand for shameless cash-ins.

Wilder’s performances were equal parts mad and wet-eyed. He could oscillate between these two states at a manic pace—he brought this bipolar joie de vivre to the role of Willy Wonka. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I ever saw Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. But I do remember the iconic scene that introduced the ever-elusive chocolatier. You know the one:

[Wonka] comes out of the door carrying a cane and then walks toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.

The fact that this entrance was entirely Wilder’s idea says a lot about his commitment and his boundless imagination: when director Mel Stuart asked him to explain his entrance, Wilder quipped, ”Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”
That about sums up the magic of Gene Wilder — his was a talent deeper than the page. It shined in-between lines and still stands as inspiration for today’s music-makers and dreamers of dreams, and we all should thank him for it.

Nike Officially Unveils Kevin Hart's Free Train Instinct / Sneaker Shopping with Kevin Hart

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If he’s not on stage or on the movie screen making millions of people laugh, you’ll find him training as hard as some of your favorite professional athletes. Now, after debuting the kicks on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon back in January, Nike and the Philadelphia native have teamed up to deliver the brand new Nike Free Train Instinct Hart.
Both red and blue colorways have been revealed in dedication to his children, but a new black colorway also makes its way to the scene staying consistent with the theme’s reflective inspirational phrases. Said Hart of the shoe:

This shoe is bigger than the fashion behind it. It fits my training needs. It’s built for everything — running, jumping, cutting and lifting… The Nike Free Train Instinct Hart is just one part of the #MoveWithHart journey that I hope helps inspire millions to become the best version of themselves through physical fitness. Every time you see or put on these sneakers, I hope it’s just a constant reminder to always put your best foot forward, to never quit and to know that you can reach your training goals and achieve personal greatness.

You can expect the Nike Free Train Instinct Hart to officially release on June 11 in its black colorway on Nike SNKRS while the red and blue editions will be available in limited quantities only in the U.S. come mid-July.

Kevin Hart and Joe La Puma go Sneaker Shopping at 21 Mercer in New York City to talk about the time Hart had an “accident” during a run, all while showing off his new Nike sneakers.

COMEDY: Inside The NBA: Shaq Gets April Fooled / Rihanna Pranks Jimmy Kimmel For April Fools / Will Ferrell & Kevin Hart Plays Tough Calls

Matt Winer filling in for EJ pulls a practical joke on Shaq for April Fool’s Day by not including him in the top 10 centers of all time.
                 

Rihanna’s late night April Fools’ prank on a sleeping Jimmy Kimmel.
                  

Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart visit the Grantland studio to play “Tough Calls,” in which they decide whether they’d get Mike Tyson’s face tattoo, whether Shaquille O’Neal would make for a good pen pal, and whether they’d put a puppy in jail.

COMEDY: Real Michael Bolton (@mbsings) in Office Space

                 

Office Space with Michael Bolton from Funny Or Die

Funny or Die could convince the singer Michael Bolton to play the character Michael Bolton in a recreation of classic scenes from Office Space.

Kevin Hart Is On Track for the Biggest Comedy Tour of All Time

Kevin Hart is an enormously popular comedian, with hit movies, albums and television appearances, a huge fan base and global name recognition. Yet it may come as a surprise to learn that his upcoming What Now? tour, which begins April 9 in Texas, is on track to become the highest grossing comedy tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore, selling more than 600,000 tickets and grossing $35 million to date — and it’s only March.
In New York alone, Hart quickly sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden, along with Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. — a trio of metro-area plays that only the most confident pop or rock stars would even attempt (and he’s already booked a fourth area venue in Wantagh, N.Y. for August 28). To top it off, Hart, 35, will wrap the tour at Lincoln Financial Field in his hometown of Philadelphia on Aug. 30 – making him the first comedian ever to headline a stadium.
Arcade Fire’s Win Butler Shines in NBA Celebrity Game, Kevin Hart Wins MVP
By every metric — ticket sales, festival appearances, venue size and the sheer volume of comics doing strong business — live comedy is at its highest-ever level, pulling in annual revenues of more than $300 million, Billboard estimates. But even by that standard, Hart is in a league of his own.
“The tour is truly remarkable,” says Geof Wills, president of Live Nation Comedy (promoter of 60 of the nearly 70 shows on Hart’s tour), citing the $70 average ticket price and the multiple shows in arenas — often two sellouts in one night. While other comics often focus films and television at the expense of full-scale tours, Hart “wants to do the films, the specials and the concerts,” says Wills. “Kevin is really going for it all.”
Hart, who is booked by Mike Berkowitz at APA, has been touring nationally since 2009, and began adding arenas to his route a few years ago when doubles at performing arts centers and theaters were selling out quickly. On his last tour in 2012, Hart stepped up to arenas in “quite a few markets,” Wills says. Numerous film roles, an active social media presence, and the non-polarizing nature of Hart’s comedy continue to boost the comic’s popularity.
‘SNL’ Slams Justin Bieber’s Calvin Klein Ads in Kevin Hart-Hosted Episode
Still, the “biggest-ever comedy tour” is a relative term. Jeff Dunham owns the Guinness world record for ticket sales, with nearly 2 million for his 2007-2010 Spark of Insanity tour. In 2009, Dane Cook grossed $26,570,000with attendance of 436,000 from 45 shows — a feat already trounced by Hart projections. (Decades ago, Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy put up big numbers, but abandoned concert tours relatively early.)
And while Wills says What Now? is “without question” the biggest comedy tour he’s seen in more than 20 years of concert promotion, he notes that other elite comedians could meet Hart’s numbers “if they really wanted to — they just don’t.” Dave Chappelle can crush the box office but usually opts for a residency model. He sold out 10 Radio City Music Hall shows — 60,000 tickets — in 2014 “in his sleep,” Wills says, for a gross of $5 million, according to Boxscore.
Still, Hart’s success makes a statement about the overall health of live comedy. Acts such as Louis CK, Daniel Tosh, Amy Schumer, Brian Regan, Hannibal Buress, Patton Oswalt, Bill Burr and Aziz Ansari are “making real waves,” Wills says. “And that’s just tip-of-the-iceberg-ing it.”

Lip Sync Battle with Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart and Jimmy Fallon

Each contestant had to pick two songs of their choice and perform them for the audience. Will Ferrell kicked things off with Beyonce‘s Drunk In Love, while Jimmy performed pop anthem Since You Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson. Kevin Hart slowed things down when he performed John Legend‘s All Of Me.
For the second round, Ferrell went to Frozen‘s Let It Go for his pick, Fallon brought out Drew Barrymore for some Dirty Dancing and Kevin Heart preformed Katy Perry Eye Of The Tiger.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner on Bill Cosby: ‘It’s Painful to Watch My Mentor Go Through This’

Warner commented on the slew of allegations plaguing his former TV father.
“He’s one of my mentors, and he’s been very influential and played a big role in my life as a friend and mentor,” Warner tells Billboard. “Just as it’s painful to hear any woman talk about sexual assault, whether true or not, it’s just as painful to watch my friend and mentor go through this.
“I can’t really speak on any of the allegations because obviously, I was not there. The Bill Cosby I know has been great to me and great for a lot of people. What he’s done for comedy and television has been legendary and history-making. What he’s done for the black community and education has been invaluable. That’s the Bill Cosby I know. I can’t speak on the other stuff.”

Kevin Hart (@KevinHart4real) On Saturday Night Live

                 

Last night Kevin Hart was the host of the Saturday Night Live. In Kevin Heart monologue he discussed the raccoon problem in his neighborhood and why he wouldn’t rescue his fiancée from a mountain lion attack.

Kevin Hart On The Cover Of The Hollywood Reporter / Kevin Hart (@KevinHart4real) & Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon) Play Slapjack / Kevin Hart (@KevinHart4real) The Breakfast Club Interview

Kevin Hart scans his iPhone, flipping through notes for future jokes. There’s one about “a nigga [who] just came and keyed my car because I stopped at a red light”; a line about “my brother being so negative, no matter what we’re doing he will always find something wrong with it”; and a quip that Hart can’t “handle amusement parks in my old age. I get dizzy and shit now!!! My whole day’s f—ed up after getting on a roller coaster.”

These aren’t so much jokes as musings — on life, on people, on the million ordinary things that ripple through his mind. The comic jots down dozens of them each day, hundreds each week, punching them into his phone almost compulsively.
Forget any notions that Hart, 35, isn’t serious about his work. His aims are great, his ambitions unlimited. He wants to equal his heroes (Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock) and dwarf them by building an empire even larger than theirs.
“I want to be a mogul, like Oprah or Jay Z or Tyler Perry,” he says.
To that end, Hart is riding an extraordinary wave, with three No. 1 movies in 2014 (Ride Along, Think Like a Man Too and About Last Night) and a fourth likely to follow when Sony’s The Wedding Ringer opens Jan. 16.
He also has an ongoing TV series, BET’s reality spoof Real Husbands of Hollywood, which is shooting its fourth season; and whopping DVD sales — even in a declining home-entertainment market — for his comedy concerts. 2011′s Laugh at My Pain DVD went double platinum in less than a month.
His 2012 tour, Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, was seen in 10 countries and 80 cities, and sold more than 540,000 tickets, making it one of the most successful comedy tours to date (he also does many dozens of stand-up performances every year in smaller venues). Hart also sold out Madison Square Garden (only the sixth comedian ever to do so) and earned more than $1 million in Los Angeles on one evening alone. These tours are funded by Hart, too. “I invest in myself,” he says. “I spent $750,000 on [the 2011] Laugh at My Pain [tour], and it did $15 million. I spent $2.5 million on Let Me Explain, and it did $32 million. I’m about to spend maybe $4 million on this next one [What Next?], and the goal is to get to $100 million.”
These are the pillars of a burgeoning business that’s run though a 12-man company, HartBeat Productions, which includes a photographer and videographer who record his every move, partly for reference, partly for Hart’s personal archive, accessible in a series of bound volumes he keeps in his den at home.
Despite his easygoing manner, Hart has a single-minded focus that excludes nearly everything else. It’s the sort of focus he believes he needs in order to win. “If you have a mogul mind-set, you’ll last a lot longer. That’s the mind-set of a winner.”
Hart swats away critiques, even when they come from his occasional boss, Sony’s Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper, who, referring to Hart’s desire to boost his $3 million salary, noted in a hacked email made public, “I’m not saying he’s a whore, but he’s a whore.”
Hart shot back on Instagram: “I worked very hard to get where I am today. I look at myself as a brand and because of that I will never allow myself to be taken advantage of. I OWN MY BRAND … I MAKE SMART DECISIONS FOR MY BRAND … which is why I’m able to brush ignorance off of my shoulder and continue to move forward.”
A month after that volatile exchange, Hart takes a more muted view. “I’ve talked to him,” he says of Culpepper (who did not respond to a request for comment). “Clint called right after. It’s not like I wanted to challenge him — that’s just how he talks. He did [apologize], but there was no need. When you negotiate, you say whatever you say.” He adds: “Nothing affected me. It’s very hard to put me in a negative position, man. I’m happy. And I’ll continue to be happy.”

Happiness isn’t always the greatest source of laughter, of course, and one wonders whether Hart is being disingenuous when he says he has “no demon. I’m not an angry person. I left those years behind.”
He may not be angry, but just what is he? “My point of view is my reality,” he insists elliptically. He’s funny, but to what end? He’s neither political, nor satirical, nor remotely metaphysical, and yet he’s the most successful black comic working today — maybe the most successful comic, period.
There’s no denying his skill, as I see one Saturday evening in November, when Hart (who’s repped by UTA’s Steve Cohen, Jay Gassner and Jeremy Zimmer and for touring by APA’s Mike Berkowitz) performs before a packed house of about 3,000 ethnically diverse students in San Bernardino, Calif., halfway through a tour that will stretch from 2014 into 2015. Dressed in black jeans and bright red Nikes, with two gold chains swaying from his neck, the 5-foot-4 comic dominates the stage as he regales the crowd with his feelings about moving to suburban Tarzana, Calif.
Everyone hollers and hoots, though that’s more because of his manic manner than his content. “[There's] a bunch of wildlife, a bunch of animals ’round where I live [that] I don’t like, plain and simple,” he says. “I’m walking my dog, and out of nowhere this old lady opens up the window and stuck her head out.” His voice rises several octaves: “She’s like, ‘You better watch your dog! Don’t let them eat him like they did mine!’ And she closed the window.” He blinks in disbelief. “Who’s them? What are we talking about, people or animals?! A lot of weird shit in my house, man.”
Expletives pepper his routine, but he’s never salacious, never tawdry and never makes comments about women or gays that might offend some or even all. He seems almost genetically inoffensive, in fact, and avoids anything controversial, from the death of Eric Garner to Ferguson, Mo. “I’m not interested in politics,” he shrugs.
And it works. The comedy of the self plays big. Forget the biting satire of a Jon Stewart; forget even the sophomoric appeal of a Seth Rogen. Hart is the quintessential comic for the age of selfies and social media. Just being Hart is good enough.
“Once I realized that I had a voice and didn’t have to pretend to be a different version of myself, I stopped forcing the situation, stopped being a character,” he says. “I stopped and went, ‘OK, I can just be me.’ ”
•••
Sitting with Hart in the spacious kitchen of his $2 million home, munching on pizza and Caesar salad that his fiancee, model Eniko Parrish, 30, has just brought in from California Pizza Kitchen, I find him warm and easy to like.
His father, Henry Witherspoon, 66, who’s sitting with us, says, “I was worried about him for a while,” but that seems to refer more to Hart’s finances than any other issue. “He’s fine now,” adds Witherspoon.
Two dogs loll around, one a large Doberman with her ears wrapped in plaster after being cropped, the other a miniature version of the same. I’m wary of both: The bigger one, Roxy, has just peed on the floor right next to me, and who knows where she’ll do her business next.

Hart with fiancee Parrish and his kids, Heaven and Hendrix, at the 2014 Kids’ Choice Awards.
There’s an easy bond between Hart and Parrish, who seem genuinely close after six years together. In her sweats, Parrish appears more like a girl-next-door than “the woman who broke up a marriage,” as Hart’s ex-wife, Torrei, has labeled her. (That drew a sardonic tweet from Hart: “I guess giving a woman over 20k a month and still being there for her and being a incredible father isn’t enough!”)
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Hart stifles a yawn. He’s had only 3½ hours of sleep, pushing the limit even for him. He gets up at 5.30 a.m. most days and works out for an hour before heading to his office in Encino or to the endless spitballing sessions that consume him when he’s not on the road. Since being slapped with a DUI in April 2013, when he was pulled over for driving 90 mph, he’s been driven around in a huge van that has been converted into a mobile office.
“They told me to get out of the car,” he says. “I took the little sobriety test. They said that I failed. Locked me up, put me in cuffs. That was pretty stupid [of me]. Like, no matter how drunk I was getting, if I’d known that’s what I’m doing, why am I driving?” Hart went to jail. “I stayed in for like two hours and went home. My fiancee came to get me. I had no record, so they let me out.” He pleaded no contest and is on probation.

Even with someone else driving, he never seems to have a free moment. He has no time to read anything but scripts and has trouble naming any favorite books beyond Of Mice and Men, which he’s been reading with his kids, Heaven, 9, and Hendrix, 7. (He says he’d like to write a book of his own soon, possibly a comedic memoir.)

With an empire built on his signature manic, upbeat comedy, Hart (right, with a photo assistant) won’t let obstacles slow him down: “Everything happens for a reason. The question isn’t, ‘What happened?’; the question is, ‘How do you handle it?’
”He hardly watches TV, though Keeping Up With the Kardashians is playing in the background at his house. “That’s for Eniko,” he says. The two are planning a “destination wedding” in 2016.
After finishing his pizza, he leads me on a tour. There’s a sitting area just off the modern, white-counter kitchen. There’s a large dining room that seems completely untouched (Hart says he never has guests for dinner). Then there’s Hart’s massive bedroom and two gigantic walk-in closets, one for his clothes and another for Parrish’s.
His shelves are lined with sneakers, from the regular ones you might buy at a Foot Locker, to others that he says are worth $7,000 to $10,000. He has about 500 pairs, he notes. “I love sneakers. I have OVOs, Jordan 12s, Pit Crews. I have Yezys, all of them.”Downstairs, giant portraits of the comedians he most admires — Cosby, Rock, Murphy, Richard Pryor, Martin Lawrence and Dave Chappelle — line the walls. I ask if he’s thinking of getting rid of Cosby in the wake of allegations about the 77-year-old’s conduct. “I’m not going to take the picture down,” he says. “The picture serves a purpose for me. These were the men who built a legacy doing what they love to do, which is telling jokes.”
Read more Kevin Hart Says N-Word ‘Not the Same’ as Redskins Team Name
Does he think Cosby is guilty? “Right now, it’s a lot of speculation,” he says. “All I can do is just say my prayers, and my wishes go out to all of the women who are potentially involved. His personal life has nothing to do with me. I can’t control it. I will never try. It doesn’t stop me from being an admirer of his work. His work and his personal life are two separate things.”
•••
Hart’s own personal life is inextricable from his work.
Moving into his den a while later, pushing aside stacks of his DVDs to perch on the edge of an armchair, he speaks of his boyhood in one of the rougher parts of North Philadelphia. “[Where I grew up] was not a place of wealth,” he says. “A friend of mine in high school was shot in the head over gambling. We stayed in a one-bedroom apartment — my momma had the bedroom, and me and my brother stayed in the hallway. We had bunk beds, and I was on the bottom. But it was enough. I lived there for 17-plus years. So when that’s all you know, it’s fine. There’s nothing to measure it to. It wasn’t a thing where we were embarrassed. It was life.”
His mom, Nancy, struggled to provide for Kevin and his older brother, Robert, while working as a computer analyst at the University of Pennsylvania. She was strict, and devout, and each week took her sons to the local Zion Methodist Church. She encouraged Kevin to take up competitive swimming, in which he was nationally ranked. Sports were his love, especially basketball.
Her strength made up for his dad’s weakness. When Kevin was a boy, Witherspoon (a father of 10) began a long battle with addiction, “probably heroin, crack, coke — serious stuff,” says his son. “But I will say that I got my edge from my dad. He taught me how to fight and made sure I know how to protect myself.”

Witherspoon, he says, “was in and out of jail, “so the fact that my mom held it down and managed to work, take us to extracurricular activities, check homework, go about her day — that, to me, was dope.”
Her presence, and his father’s absence, shaped him; he says he now sees a great deal of his mother in himself and shares her commitment to family; his kids spend half their time with him.
While he says he got his humor from his dad, who re-entered Kevin’s life after breaking free of drugs, it was his mother, who died in 2007 of ovarian cancer, who gave him his drive, though they battled frequently. “The thing I regret was the talking back,” he says, “being so tough, always giving my two cents before I listened.”
On one occasion, when his mom refused to let him attend early-morning basketball tryouts, he adjusted every clock in their home. “I set all of the clocks forward, her watches, the VCRs, everything,” he recalls. The next day, the family got up two hours early, Hart went to his tryouts, and his mom left for work. When she arrived at her office and found nobody there, she was livid. “She came to my school and pulled me out of class and beat the living shit out of me,” says Hart. “That was a tough whooping. That whooping lasted.”
Thanks to her, he could have had free tuition at Penn, but he never was a gifted student and preferred to be the class clown, “funny all the time.” He grew up on TV comedies such as Diff’rent Strokes, Sanford & Son and The Cosby Show but never imagined a career in comedy.
After briefly attending community college, he got a job at a City Sports store, where he could cultivate his love of sneakers. “I had to watch others come and go with what I aspired to,” he says. “It was tough. That’s what makes or breaks kids.”
But comedy quickly became his calling. When a friend told him he should try stand-up, Hart entered local competitions and won six amateur nights at $70 a pop. “I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,’ ” he says.
Hart’s mother subsidized his rent while he gave comedy a go. “She said, ‘You got a year to figure out how to support yourself,’” recalls Hart. ” ‘If you can’t, then you’re going back to school.’”
Comedy clicked. Soon Hart found a manager, Dave Becky, who still represents him (comedian Dave Attell connected them), and got his break in 2002 on Judd Apatow‘s TV series Undeclared. He followed that with films from 2004′s Soul Plane to 2012′s The Five-Year Engagement and Think Like a Man, culminating in last year’s triumphant run.
Now The Wedding Ringer may lift him to an even higher level.
The story of a professional “best man” (Hart) hired by a hapless groom (Josh Gad), the movie presents Hart in a new, less manic light. Here, if anything, he is the straight man to Gad’s comic foil. It’s the first time Hart has had to carry a film in the lead and the first time he’s been seen in a part that closely resembles him: warm and real and fully dimensional.
“I was blown away by the opportunity to play this character that had so many different levels,” he says. “That’s what I cared about, showing a different acting side.”
When the screenplay was sold in 2002, nobody knew his name. Written by newcomers Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, it then was titled The Golden Tux and quickly was snapped up by Miramax after Todd Phillips (The Hangover) expressed interest in directing.
That was the start of a long, slow descent into oblivion, as the project bounced from one star to another. “It was Vince Vaughn for a time, then Ice Cube,” says Garelick, who also directed the movie, “and Dave Chappelle at one moment, Dan Fogler at another. There were lots of different combinations of people.”
When the Weinsteins left Miramax in 2005, the movie fell apart, and when Miramax was sold to Colony Capital in 2010, the project went into deep freeze, where it remained until producer Adam Fields (Donnie Darko) discovered it.
Fields was in a meeting with Colony in 2010 when an executive suggested he look at a list of 642 properties the company believed it now owned through Miramax. The list was full of inaccuracies, says Fields, but after an extensive search through three warehouses and about 38,000 boxes full of contracts, screenplays and other documents, he found Tux and brought it to Screen Gems.
After an initial read-through with Chris Pine (who was unavailable when the movie shot), Culpepper took it to Hart, and a March 2013 reading took place in a Sony Pictures conference room. The group was impressed.
“It must have been the first time Kevin read the script,” says Garelick. “But you could tell something was special.”
Special, no doubt. But can Hart rise beyond being special to being great?
He is so focused on moving forward, he never seems to address the deeper questions that might lift him there. Asked what could elevate his work, he says: “Just continue with life. The more life experiences you have, the more you can talk about.”
In life, he is as propulsive as he is onstage, as if propulsion alone will shoot him to the top. “He never stops,” says Etan Cohen, his director on Get Hard, a buddy movie with Will Ferrell. “The mantra of Kevin is hard work and hustle.”
Even now, he has two movies wrapped (Ride Along 2 and Get Hard, which will open in March) and is exploring how he one day can take over the distribution of his own DVDs (Codeblack Films has handled several), thereby avoiding the middlemen.
He doesn’t dwell on prejudice, or wonder if he might have had more opportunity if he were white. “That’s not for me to say, because I’m not white,” he says.
He agrees with his mentor, Top Five co-star Rock, who lambasted the industry’s insistence that African-American performers “cross over” and find a white audience in a recent essay for THR. Hart insists he doesn’t get hung up on such things. (Said Rock: “If we’re going to just be honest and count dollars and seats and not look at skin color, Kevin Hart is the biggest comedian in the world. If Kevin Hart is playing 40,000 seats in a night and Jon Stewart is playing 3,000, the fact that Jon Stewart’s 3,000 are white means Kevin has to cross over? That makes no sense.”)
“The point he was making was very valid,” says Hart. “It’s always about us crossing over. You never hear about it going the other way. You look at concerts and the touring industry, and the people who buy those tickets are urban crowds. It’s crazy the numbers I’ve done on tour: You’re talking about a guy who does 40,000 to 50,000 people a weekend. What he said, I agree with 110 percent.”
Still, he continues: “I don’t feed into the race game. I don’t give it that much thought. I never have and never will.”
And why should he? He’s precisely where he wants to be. Soon he hopes to penetrate international audiences with his movies and build his fan base even more. And if all this keeps him too busy for self-reflection, so be it. Later, perhaps, he’ll stop and look back. For now, his eyes are on the road ahead.
“You know, a lot of people make it and then stop,” he says. “Why? When I look at Eddie Murphy, when I look at Will Smith, when I look at Denzel Washington, when I look at what all those people have achieved, why would I stop when you can keep going and keep achieving? There’s so much more that I can do. And I’m getting close. So why stop?”

                  

Jimmy and Kevin Hart compete in a high-stakes game of blackjack where the loser of each round gets smacked in the face with a giant rubber hand.
                 

Kevin Hart stopped by The Breakfast Club spoke to DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne Tha God about movie studios not having direct connection to people, three number one films in 2014, people thinking he plays the same role, and how is ex wife and fiance are now getting along with one another.

Eddie Murphy (@eddiemurphy) – Oh Jah Jah

Eddie Murphy returns once again with this new reggae track called Oh Jah Jah. Eddie Murphy recently told Rolling Stone that his dream is to do a comedy/concert in one where he plays music to start the show.

Jerry Seinfeld On The Tonight Show

                 

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld performs jokes about why people need to get rid of their useless garbage.

Chris Rock (@chrisrock) The Breakfast Club Interview

                 

Chris Rock made his way to The Breakfast Club to sit down with Angela Yee and Charlemagne Tha God. Chris Rock talk about his latest movie Top Five, where he talked about running into DJ Envy at a basketball game, writing and directing his new film, being inspired by Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld.

Dave Chappelle (@DaveChappelle) GQ Man of the Year Interview

Kanye’s performance at Radio City Music Hall was a surprise to him, too

No one was more surprised than me when he did the surprise performance during my Radio City show. It was weird. You know what he said after the fact, which I thought was funny? He said, “Why wasn’t I on the show in the first place? Like, why wasn’t I booked?” So I don’t know what happened via the machinery. It also could be that Kanye’s like a girl that’s so pretty, nobody asks her to the dance. You know what I mean? I knew the day before that he was coming to see the show. Then, as I was walking onstage, right before I went on, Kanye was there and was like, “Yo, can I rock with y’all?” And I thought he meant in general—like, “Yeah, man, always! We all cool for life! Blah blah blah.” Talking all that shit. And then afterwards, when I say good night, I looked up. Kanye is actually onstage, standing there with a microphone in his hand. I was like, “This is nuts.”

There’s a “high possibility” he bought weed from Idris Elba back in the day

So he used to work at Carolines. During that era of my life, there’s a high possibility that I bought reefer from Idris. Fast-forward to when I was doing Chappelle’s Show. Idris would come to the set sometimes. Not the set where we’d be filming sketches, but the set when we did the live portion of the show and we showed the audience sketches. It used to be a real hot ticket in New York. There’s a lot of women who used to work on the show…all very professional, with the single exception when Idris would come around. It doesn’t matter how big a star would be on the show, when he came around, women would just lose their goddamn minds.

D’Angelo’s answering machine message is awesome

I haven’t talked to him personally in a while, but the last time I called him, he had a long outgoing message on his machine. It was like a Malcolm X speech. And the last part was so intense. He was like, “The price of freedom is death!” Beeeep! I didn’t even leave that dude a message. I just hung up the phone. Like, just listening to D’Angelo’s answering machine puts you on the no-fly list, it’s so militant.

He doesn’t think Donald Sterling should have lost ownership of the Clippers

Ultimately, I don’t think he should have lost his team. I don’t like the idea that someone could record a secret conversation and that a person could lose their assets from that, even though I think what he said was awful. When you think about the intimacy of a situation, like, can a man just chill with his mistress in peace? I just don’t like when things like that happen, because if they take shit away for things that people say that are objectionable, I may not have anything in a few years. Granted, I don’t think I say shit like “Stop bringing white people to my game.”

He doesn’t necessarily agree with Kanye’s comparison between today’s celebrities and the civil rights movement

Well, okay now, I don’t know about that. But I do see a common denominator in the sense that the issue of privacy in general is everyone’s issue. And his version of that is very extreme. I’m a celebrity in some people’s eyes, but not to the extent he is. I saw on Yahoo that his wife got tackled in Paris. Like, just crazy shit. I think that he’s right in the sense that scrutiny in and of itself is oppressive. If someone sits there and stares at you while you eat, you won’t even eat the way you normally do, because it’ll make you so uncomfortable. If I look at my dog when he’s eating, he will look at me like, “Dave, I will bite you. What are you looking at? I’m trying to eat.” It’s something that dehumanizes a person, being on display like that. So is it like the civil rights movement? Not quite. The metrics are a little wrong to make that comparison. But it is a civil rights issue, in a sense. Because how is he supposed to live his life? It’s like someone putting their ear to your butt and being like, “Ew, you farted!” Stop listening to my asshole!

Rob Ford wouldn’t let him smoke on stage in Toronto

I was in Toronto for a few shows, and they told me I couldn’t smoke onstage. And I was like, “Well, can’t you just waive the rule tonight?” And they’re like, “It’s a citywide ordinance.” So I got up the next morning and went to the mayor’s office. This is before all that shit about him came out.
He walked in and was like, “What can I do for you?” And I told him, “These ordinances exist in the United States, but they’re often waived in contexts of performance, because it’s an integral part of what I do.” He replied, “That’s it?” “That’s it,” I said. Then he told me, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. The laws of Toronto are the same for everybody. We appreciate you coming, we’re glad you’re here, but we can’t change the law because it disagrees with you.” He really gave me this whole speech. I should have said, “You didn’t let me finish: ‘smoke crack rocks onstage!’”

He wrote eleven failed TV pilots before The Chappelle Show

And it wasn’t just that I was doing stand-up before I did that show. I probably did eleven failed television pilots. And I have to be honest: Like, maybe one went to series. Another one was bought, but I quit. It just wasn’t good. None of ‘em were really good. And it took that experience, those experiences, to learn how to do television.

He wants to make cameos in a bunch of TV series

For one year, I want to do this thing where I guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. I’d be a zombie in The Walking Dead. A corpse on CSI. I’d be the first black guy to fuck Olivia Pope on Scandal….

He has expert parenting advice

Also, I have this thing where I meet people whose kids are, like, superhuman perfect: “She speaks three languages now, blah blah.” That used to make me feel shitty. Like, “Aw man, I really have to crack the whip and do this and that.” But then I watch their kid for a while and then watch mine. And my kids look actually happy. And I learned early on that perfectionism and parenthood is a toxic combination for everybody involved. In other words, so many things can flourish naturally. All you gotta do is make sure the soil’s right. But I view myself more like a guide than a ruler. Their mother’s the ruler.

He isn’t done just yet. We think.

I guess [Radio City Music Hall] has the connotation of a sunset, because of the bucket-list analogy. There was something very definitive about it. In other words, for me to leave this show the way I did and then to sell, like, 60,000 tickets in New York City is a pretty big deal. And what was crazy was that if the venue were available longer, we could have kept going. So if it was the end of something, it would definitively be the end of any doubt that there was something real between me and the audience of people. ‘Cause you do doubt that, especially if you’re, you know, sequestered. I’ll say it like this: There’s still some shit on the list. I still got some shit on my bucket list.

What’s another thing on that bucket list?

 For one year, I want to do this thing where I guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. The fact that television ultimately made me famous was very gratifying for me. Chris Tucker did it in movies, and Chris Rock did it from his stand-up, which was very impressive. But you know, the thing that people most will remember me for is Chappelle’s Show. If I were to never do anything else, that show would be a culmination of what was a very long and tedious process of me learning how to be in the television business. By Cory McClanahan