Kevin Hart doesn't know why you're asking him about things said at The Roast Of Kevin Hart

There was, admittedly, a bit more to it than that, as Hart showed up on The Breakfast Club this morning to get a fairly diligent grilling from co-hosts Charlamagne Tha God and Loren LoRosa about how quiet he’s been in the aftermath of the production. Hart—who was one of several celebrities who appeared at Floyd’s memorial service back in 2020, calling for police reform—noted that Hinchcliffe’s joke mocking Floyd’s last words “wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience.” But also, he went on, that same audience had tuned in to a comedy roast featuring the Kill Tony guy, so what did they expect to hear? The actor and comedian (who lauded Hinchcliffe for having “arguably…the best set or one of the best sets” of the night) asserted that roasts are built around transgressive material, including jokes he, personally, doesn’t like, so if you don’t like them, don’t watch.

More importantly, though, Kevin Hart would like to remind you that none of this is his business (even if, in a strictly financial sense, it absolutely was his business). Asked about an interview in which Floyd’s brother expressed his disappointment that Hart hadn’t vocalized some kind of protest in response to Hinchcliffe’s joke, Hart seemed baffled at the idea he might disrupt “the production” in order to lodge a protest. Hart, who’s credited as an executive producer on the special, which prominently featured his name and face in its promotion, boiled his entire response down to “simplicity. Remove me from it—I didn’t say it,” so if you want to be mad, be mad at Hinchcliffe or Gillis. He also seems to have a genuine emotional reaction to the idea he should be obligated to say something publicly, noting that he privately called former NBA player Stephen Jackson, a childhood friend of Floyd’s, to clear the air with him about the special in the immediate aftermath—but bristled at the idea that such a conversation should be part of a public discourse. “People just want to know you care,” Charlamagne asserts, which got the sharpest pushback from Hart of the whole conversation: “I don’t fucking need to prove to people that I give a fuck. No! If you open that door, then that’s the door people expect all the… Why the fuck do I need to do that?”

Ultimately, Hart positions himself at the center of a sort of responsibility-abnegating paradox: Sure, he helped pick Hinchcliffe to perform at his roast, on the strength of his success at the 2024 Roast Of Tom Brady. But that doesn’t make him, either as an executive producer or the face of the event, responsible for Hinchcliffe’s words—or for reacting to them when they crossed any lines Hart himself might hold. “The job was to produce a successful roast,” Hart concluded. “Which I did”—leaving the listener to infer what metrics are being used to measure Hart’s particular definitions of “success.”