Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe returned home from Los Angeles with a lot to say.
Speaking to his audience shortly after the Netflix roast of Kevin Hart, Hinchcliffe addressed the backlash that had already begun forming, showing no inclination to walk anything back.
“We just got in, we’re fresh off of Los Angeles, live last night, the Roast of Kevin Hart was something else, huh?” he said, setting a casual but pointed tone from the start.
The label generating the most noise was one Hinchcliffe treated with visible amusement. “It’s the first time I’ve been called a N*zi, multiple times in just a few hours,” he said. “I guess that’s what LA writers rooms… a lot of mentally ill liberals out there that somehow, with all these blacks and Jews and Mexicans around me, I guess I’m a N*zi somehow. I guess the guy that pulls names out of a bucket giving everybody an opportunity is a N*zi. Isn’t that something?”
He reserved particular scorn for the performers he saw as ill-equipped to judge him. In his view, the critics who came at him had spent entire careers reading other people’s words rather than developing anything original.
“They just read what the writers wrote for them without any originality whatsoever,” he said. On the writing staff itself, he drew a clear line between those he respected and those he didn’t. “The writers I used to work with, there’s a few great writers in that writer’s room, and the rest of them are just living in a bubble of mental illness,” he said.
On the specific accusations directed his way, Hinchcliffe held his ground.
“I got called a N*zi, gay, a racist over and over again. I’m none of those three things,” he said, before turning the critique squarely back on his accusers. “They are fat, ugly, black, Jewish, everything I said was real about them, just a reminder.”
The criticism Hinchcliffe is responding to comes from multiple directions. Motivational speaker Dr. Umar Johnson, speaking on The Art Of Dialogue, described how his inboxes were flooded the day after Mother’s Day with people sending him clips from the roast.
After watching the entire special from start to finish, Johnson described what he saw as a coordinated effort to demean Black people under the guise of comedy. The moment that stood out most was a Hinchcliffe line referencing George Floyd: “George Floyd is looking up at us and laughing so hard that he can’t breathe.”
Johnson was unsparing. “You making jokes about black people who were m*rdered by police? That’s comedy?” he said.
Johnson also addressed roast host Shane Gillis, taking issue with an opening line thanking Netflix “for choosing me to co-host this celebration of black excellence,” which Johnson called “an underhanded jab at black excellence.” He catalogued other moments he found offensive, including jokes aimed at Lizzo and several references throughout the show to the late husband of comedian Sheryl Underwood, who took his own life.
Johnson placed the entire evening within a historical context. “What they’re trying to do is bring back the minstrel show,” he said. “Back from 1830 to 1930, white people would dress up in blackface and they would play ridiculous stereotypical black characters. The minstrel shows were done to justify the mistreatment of blacks, justify the lynching of blacks, justify the slavery of blacks. And guess what? They trying to do it again.”
He called for organized responses from the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and major Black fraternities and sororities, urging each institution to send formal letters to Netflix.
Hinchcliffe also pushed back on a specific media narrative forming around his exchange with Chelsea Handler. “I woke up today and even though every human that I’ve seen told me that it was unbelievable, there’s news articles, because the news isn’t real, nothing is real, that say that I got lit up by Chelsea Handler, which is very, very funny because that’s not what happened at all,” he said. “You can’t believe anything you see or read on the news anymore. You have to actually watch the thing for yourself.”
Talking about Handler, he said, “She said I took the Saudi Arabia money. She was wrong about things.”
He also described a technical failure during the broadcast that he turned into an opportunity. “The teleprompter only went down during my set,” he said, “and it gave me a lot of opportunity to remind Chelsea Handler what she looks like and where her life is, because she had it coming.”
Kevin Hart had signaled the nature of the evening well before the cameras rolled. In a conversation with Shaquille O’Neal, Hart acknowledged that his public image had grown more polished and commercially cautious over the years.
“I got very PC and brand specific and corporate and, you know, smarter as the years went on for business,” he said. But he made equally clear the roast was a deliberate step back toward something rawer.
On whether roast comedy should observe any limits, Hart was straightforward. “When you’re in the mindset of like, jokes are jokes, and the intent behind the jokes is to get a laugh, nothing’s personal,” he said.
He described the roast as a return to what he called “the raw Kev days.” “I want to talk. I want to snap,” he said.
