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Kevin Hart insists he’s never written a joke.

Which is odd, because he’s this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Hart is one the most famous comedians alive, but comedy is a mere sliver of his portfolio. He’s a restaurateur, a rapper, an actor, a businessman, a brand wholly unto himself. He has built an empire from fast-casual restaurants, a tequila brand, a protein-shake line, a production company, more than $4 billion at the box office and sold-out arena shows — ostensibly by telling jokes.

Other comics crave comedic legacies. He craves generational wealth.

He hopes to be a billionaire by the time he turns 45. That’s in July.

“For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects and establishing myself as a funding producer,” Hart told Collider in 2013.

“For me, it’s about history,” he said on an episode of “Hot Ones” in 2016. “It’s about making sure that last name Hart means something when it’s all said and done.”

“For me, it’s building an empire,” he said to Marc Maron in 2017.

Comedy, it seems, is merely the empire’s cornerstone — and some other comedians think it’s sort of weak.

“I hear so many comics say, ‘Kevin Hart’s not funny,’” Donnell Rawlings said in February on the “My Expert Opinion” podcast, though he didn’t say if he agreed with them.

“I still don’t think yo ass funny,” Mike Epps wrote on Instagram in 2018, addressing Hart.

In January, on Shannon Sharpe’s YouTube show, Katt Williams suggested that Hart is a humorless, meritless commodity — what he called an industry “plant.” Williams’s comments went viral. Hart pushed back, telling Fox 5 D.C. that Williams takes entertainment too seriously. At the circus, Hart said, “when a lion comes out and rides a bike, you don’t think about it too hard. You just go, ‘Okay, that’s crazy.’”

Kevin Kwan

Hart has built something massive. But does the last name Hart mean something in comedy? Does he consider his comedy to be impactful? Or is he a lion riding a bicycle?

We would like to ask Hart himself about all this. We spent months trying to schedule him. The Kennedy Center — which will host and confer the prize March 24 — tried helping. Maybe the interview would be in Qatar, where he had a show. Or maybe on a film set in Atlanta? Then maybe just over Zoom?

But Kevin Hart had other things to do. So we bought a $135 ticket for a bad seat in a North Charleston, S.C., concert hall, to see his “Brand New Material” tour, and listen for answers.

Hart’s small, athletic frame — he’s 5-foot-4 — prowls the stage like an NBA player on the court. All 2,300 members of the audience have locked their phones in secure pouches. All eyes are on Hart.

It’s clear what he means when he says he doesn’t write jokes. Instead, he shouts his way through meandering stories.

They usually end with a laugh line that he’ll repeat several times — each one louder — while he pantomimes, say, his explosive defecation after eating a spicy Chick-fil-A sandwich, or his family’s eye-rolling when his nephew came out as gay.

“I think I speak for the whole family when I say: We know,” he says. “We know! WE KNOW!”

The audience devours it, laughing louder with each repetition.

He was born in North Philadelphia in 1979. His father, largely absentee, was a drug addict who pulled stunts such as gifting his son a stolen dog, only to have its furious owners knocking at the door 15 minutes later. His mother was so strict that she didn’t allow him to have a bedroom door. Desperate to keep her son off the streets, she kept Hart busy with extracurriculars. He writes about all this in his 2017 memoir, “I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons.”

He credits his eventual success to both parents — his father for teaching him how not to act, and his mother for instilling discipline, though this last lesson took a while to take hold.

After dropping out of the Community College of Philadelphia before the end of the first semester, Hart took a job as a shoe salesman in a local sporting-goods store and found himself addicted to making a sale — a skill that came naturally to him, which he attributes to his charm.

A co-worker suggested he try stand-up at an amateur night at the Laff House, a comedy club in Philly. His first set was frenetic but scored a few cheers, he wrote. The second went better. He began winning stand-up competitions.

His addiction to selling shoes transformed into winning laughs. He quit the sales job to pursue comedy. His mother said she would support him for one year. If he didn’t make it, he would go back to college.

He wrote, “I could do what I did best: be the fun, loud guy.”

For nearly an hour in North Charleston, Hart is the fun, loud guy. He tells stories trafficking in broad, well-trod topics such as aging. He gets injured now but doesn’t know how! He’s scared to walk down stairs! In one bit, he pretends to pull his groin.

He spends an inordinate amount of time mocking Michael Jordan’s children.

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He says he takes penis-enlargement pills from the gas station. He performs so well in bed that his wife screams more than his name — she also bellows his Social Security number. Later, when his erection ebbs, she murmurs those same numbers in disappointment rather than glee.

Hart delights in trying to cross a line, repeatedly shouting, “That’s why I took your phones tonight!”

He asks about a medical emergency that occurred during his opener’s set. The punchline is he’s only pretending to care. He tells a story about his diabetic amputee family members trying to goad him into eating sweets, and it ends with him hobbling around stage like his one-footed uncle.

Comics such as Keith Robinson, Patrice O’Neal and Dave Attell thought so. They helped him get his start in respected New York stand-up clubs. Media mogul Damon Dash thought so. He put him in the Roc-A-Fella-produced movie “Paper Soldiers” (2002) alongside Jay-Z, Charlie Murphy and Michael Rapaport. Judd Apatow thought so. He cast him in a few episodes of his Fox sitcom “Undeclared” with Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel, 23 years ago.

Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle are scheduled to toast him at the Kennedy Center.

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

The fish-out-of-water persona he honed in movies — such as “Ride Along,” “Get Hard” and several films with Dwayne Johnson — draws big box-office receipts.

His movie character — there is really only one — is an extension of his stand-up act: frenetic, self-deprecating yet overconfident, fast-talking and, most important, LOUD.

Funny is in the ear of the listener, but perhaps the proof is in the empire, cornerstone be damned. Hart has modeled underwear for Macy’s. He’s played in major poker tournaments. He co-created a TV show in 2013 called “Real Husbands of Hollywood.” He founded a production company that pumps out the schlocky comedies he appears in. He started a venture capital firm that invests in companies that make beds, energy drinks, snacks and cleaning products.

Johnny Nunez

This “fusion between comedy and business, comedy and capitalism” is a modern phenomenon, according to stand-up historian Kliph Nesteroff, who wrote “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Comedians-Thieves-Scoundrels-History-American/dp/0802125689" target=_blank>The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy</a>.” “These are things that George Burns and Jack Benny never did, or that Moms Mabley or Eddie Murphy ever did.”

Hart’s bio on X focuses on the effort: “My name is Kevin Hart and I WORK HARD!!! That pretty much sums me up!!! Everybody Wants To Be Famous But Nobody Wants To Do The Work.”

His mentor, Robinson, confirms this by phone. “He’s the hardest-working man in show business,” Robinson says. “The James Brown of comedy.”

Hart’s empire seems impervious to threats. He cheated on his pregnant wife in 2017. No one seemed to care. In 2015 he said he would never play a gay character. No one really blinked.

In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced he would host the 2019 Oscars. Almost immediately, Twitter users and journalists began sharing a slew of his old homophobic tweets and stand-up bits. The academy asked him to apologize. He refused, resigned the gig and then gave a non-apology on Twitter.

But controversy rolls off him because he never fully admits wrongdoing. Never earnestly apologizes. Instead, he talks about personal growth — he’s always evolving and growing — and complains about cancel culture.

A bit from his 2013 special “Let Me Explain” — about how his infidelity broke up his first marriage — captures the cycle: “Yes, people, I cheated. Am I ashamed of it? No, I’m not. Do I wish I could take it back? No, no I don’t. Let me tell you why. You can’t evolve as a man if you never make a mistake.”

“I’ve been canceled, what, three or four times?” he <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/749c0756-c47b-11eb-a80c-dfb0d2172f4f?" target=_blank>said to</a> the Sunday Times, unbothered, in 2021. In the same interview he suggests that anyone who wants to cancel someone should “Shut the f--- up!”

Quantrell D. Colbert/Universal Pictures

Hart says that in high school, he dragged a bully across a football field by his face mask, ripped off his helmet and began punching him in the face, according to his memoir. Not long after, he sucker-punched another bully. “I would have thought that a fight would escalate things,” he wrote. “But the fact that it stopped the bullying taught me a lesson: Defend yourself at all times.”

On a 2022 episode of the podcast “SmartLess,” after Hart boasted that he had been drinking, co-host Jason Bateman asked him about his appearance on the entrepreneur reality show “Shark Tank.” Bateman wanted to know whether Hart was pitching or judging.

“What the f--- is that?” Hart yelled. Bateman asked again, and Hart yelled, louder, “I’m Kevin Hart, b----!”

“He’s got a certain vulnerability,” said Charleston resident Georgette “Cookie” Palasis, when asked before the show about her opinion of Hart. “He pulls at your heartstrings.”

One phrase came up repeatedly among fans in Charleston: He’s relatable. Who among us hasn’t, um, taken penis-enlargement pills from a gas station and then commanded his spouse to recite his Social Security number during sex?

But maybe we’re thinking too literally. What’s relatable isn’t the taking of the pills but the insecurity that leads to them. There is a deep, universal anxiety at the heart of Hart’s jokes. And there is a deep, universal anxiety in the way he talks about himself.

“I’m as talented as f---,” he felt the need to tell the Sunday Times.

He’s particularly fond of explaining how talented, often in defense of his funniness.

“The ‘He’s not funny’ slander is the best” began a tweetstorm in 2021, when Hart highlighted that his movies have made $4 billion in the box office and that three of his stand-up specials are among the top-10 highest grossing of all time.

“I have also turned my comedic talent into a place of business and branding and radio and other revenue streams,” he tweeted. “The hate/slander fuels me to do more.”

Is the Twain Prize about being funny? Is “fun” and “loud” close enough?

By declamation, the prize honors “an artist whose humor, much like the award’s namesake Mark Twain, has impacted American society.” Humor is subjective, but impact is a bit more measurable. One could reasonably argue that Lorne Michaels, the 2004 recipient, fathered generations of comedic talent through “Saturday Night Live,” or that Ellen DeGeneres, the 2012 recipient, used humor to change perceptions of gay people.

Deborah F. Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center, praised Hart’s “iconic characters, inimitable physical comedy, and relatable narratives” — there’s “relatable” again — and his “lasting contributions to the comedic landscape.”

Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP

But Nesteroff, the stand-up historian, notes that Hart — and last year’s winner, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/03/16/adam-sandler-interview-twain-prize/" target=_blank>Adam Sandler</a> — are difficult to contextualize because they’re technically midcareer.

“Kevin Hart really belongs to one generation of show business,” Nesteroff says. “I don’t know if we’re there yet to see specific comedians or performers that have been influenced by Kevin Hart.”

Nesteroff thinks the Twain Prize celebrates not just Hart’s comedy but the empire he built on it.

“It almost feels like we’re honoring fame,” Nesteroff says.

Which, of course, is exactly what Hart is proud of.

The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony will stream on Netflix on May 11.

Because He's Jeff Goldblum

LSU, BA in English and Film

Travis M. Andrews is a feature writer for The Washington Post. He is also the author of "Because He's Jeff Goldblum," a rumination on the enigmatic actor's career and an exploration of fame in the 21st century. He joined The Post in 2016.

Travis Andrews

Is Kevin Hart funny? Kennedy Center is giving him the Mark Twain prize.

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