The streamer managed to make a celebrity roast for the innocuous comedian Kevin Hart into an ideological free-fire zone—another sign of the Trumpification of pop culture.
Right-wing culture-war mascot Shane Gillis at the Netflix comedy roast for Kevin Hart.(Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Netflix)
In the comedy world, there should be nothing more innocuous, safe, and harmless than the words: The Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart. Hart, the star of Scary Movie, Ride Along, Central Intelligence, and two Jumanji movies, has perfected innocuousness as a $100 million brand (and that’s a conservative estimate). Except for getting bounced from the Oscars over a decade ago for a homophobic bit, Hart has been a reliably sponsor-friendly comic for a very long time. That’s why when his roast was hijacked with so much mean-spirited culture-war banter—most not even directed at its nominal target for the evening—it signaled yet another garbage-scented shift in the MAGA era of American humor.
Netflix’s choice of manosphere star Shane Gillis to host the roast looks more and more like the streaming platform gerrymandered its own show from getting too Black. “I’m your extremely white host, Shane Gillis,” he said as he took the stage, “I’d just like to thank Netflix for choosing me to host this celebration of Black excellence.”
Beside Gillis, the dais included MAGA rally headliner Tony Hinchcliffe, “roastmaster general” and last living link to the extinct Friars Club Jeff Ross, Pete Davidson, Chelsea Handler, and a blistering surprise appearance by Katt Williams. The Williams cameo was a surprise, because he has made it clear that he loathes Hart and accused him of “coonery.” It was equally clear that Williams was only there for the check and the exposure, as was Cheryl Underwood (who endured endless jokes about her husband’s suicide). Few of the comics, including Gillis, ever worked with Hart or seemed to know him. Dwayne Johnson does, and he and Kevin Hart spent nearly 43 minutes swapping somewhat creepy homoerotic and cuck jokes about Hart’s wife to end the night.
It’s safe to say that the three-hour roast packed in at least 30 minutes of solid jokes. In normal times, Hart would be an ideal target for roasting: a short man at five-foot-two, the star of reliably mediocre movies, caught on camera cheating on his wife in Las Vegas, and a celebrity with more corporate sponsors than Trump’s ballroom. Gillis paid lip service to the idea of Hart as the subject of the night, but went out of his way to include jokes like “Kevin’s so short that they’re gonna have to lynch him from a bonsai tree.”
It was when Gillis introduced Chelsea Handler that he made it clear that the night was about something else. Gillis’s line of attack: Handler’s abortions and her attendance at a 2010 dinner hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, which also included Woody Allen on the guest list. He then added, “Chelsea’s a Zionist. Not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Speaking of dead kids, she’s had several abortions…”
Seriously, a man who equates Zionism with massacring children can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing? A comedian courting outrage couldn’t take a side on that? Handler has had three abortions, two when she was 16. It says everything about Gillis that he thinks calling out abortions is a slut-shaming own. As for Handler’s Zionism, she’s also pro-Palestinian, and a Mamdani supporter. As she put it, “Shane, just so you know, Judaism and Zionism are two different things. Just like how Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places.” After Gillis brought up the Middle East, she added, “Now that your favorite leader is making the draft mandatory, I assume all of you will be signing up to go fight in Iran… Or do you tough-talking pussies only go to the Middle East for comedy festivals?” Given Handler’s actual politics, it’s not likely that Gillis was calling out her Zionism; he was targeting her religious identity. That impression gained further traction when he later offered this quip: “There’s lots of Jews here tonight. That’s not good… I mean, for the jokes.”
Later, Pete Davidson made a joke about Charlie Kirk’s murder and Tony Hinchcliffe—a featured opener at Trump’s 2024 Madison Square Garden rally whose racist rant on Puerto Rico even had the Trumps squirming that close to Election Day—made one about George Floyd’s. Davidson said of Hinchcliffe, “Tony reminds me of Charlie Kirk, in that he’s definitely been on camera letting a guy unload in his throat.” Hinchcliffe, while roasting Hart, said: “The Black community is so proud of you. Right now, George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”
Kirk and Floyd were both murdered and remain martyrs for two different communities. Like Gillis’s jokes on Handler, these are pure exercises in culture-war humor. They’re about wounding the communities that have adopted certain comics as ideological mascots. Davidson’s joke, among many others offered up by the celebrity roasters that night, also made it clear that homophobia and accusing a man of being gay is still the ultimate comedy-roast slam.
If The Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart proves nothing else, it’s that there’s not an inch of cultural space in the Trump 2.0 era that can’t be weaponized. No comic mentioned Trump by name, but his gleefully cruel sensibility dominated the evening. Roasts have long been a comedy staple, dating back to the 1970s when Dean Martin hosted breezy NBC specials where Don Rickles could go off on Martin, Frank Sinatra, or Johnny Carson. It was an hour of G-rated clubby insult comedy. Later, Gen X comedian Jeff Ross brought the roast back on Comedy Central, giving it the cachet of transgressive cable fare. Even with edgier, R-rated jokes, that era of roasts maintained the premise that the comics going after each other were, if not friends, at least friendly.
That’s clearly no longer the case. These people hate one another, and roasting Hart was just window-dressing for the real roast of everyone else. Increasingly, American comedy has reflected Trump culture. Comics looked the other way on huma rights abuses to perform at lucrative rates for the Saudi royal family at the Riyadh Comedy Fest. Some comics were ready recruits to Trump’s now-suspended quest to take control of the Kennedy Center and book the shows himself to weed out dissenting artists. Political comedy isn’t just a diverting perk of office for Trump; no, it’s another front in the culture war that has to be won by any means necessary, like politicizing the Federal Communications Commission to go after resistance-branded comedians such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. It’s probably no coincidence that no comic featured in the Hart show went after Trump: Who needs to have the FCC or DOJ targeting you over a Netflix roast?
Trump’s political fortunes rose on his genius for social-media trolling—often in a blatantly racist register—which cost him very little in his two successful runs for the White House. Netflix found something similar in its contract to back Dave Chappelle and his transphobic and homophobic jokes. The streamer’s executives got a higher return from subscribers from it than it cost them. Shane Gillis, of course, became yet another poster comic for the alleged excesses of cancel culture after Saturday Night Live fired him for anti-Asian podcast jokes. Still traumatized by the firing, Gillis now mumbles his way through such jokes, soaked in flop sweat, nervous that he’ll get booted off the stage again like MAGA’s own Fozzie Bear.
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Netflix—which was outbid at the 11th hour for control of the Warner Bros. media empire by Skydance and the Trump-aligned Ellison family—understands that these sort of culture-war controversies can build obsessive fan bases, especially on the right. So do comics like Gillis and Hinchcliffe, whose jokes felt more like they were crafted to score points for their real audiences, not Hart’s.
The streaming giant has also partnered with manosphere comics like Andrew Schulz and a Kill Tony gameshow for Hinchcliffe. For the 2026 Netflix Is a Joke Festival, in between the Seinfeld and Letterman shows, Netflix pulled a classic Trump move by pardoning a sex offender, Louis C.K. Netflix booked him at the Hollywood Bowl. Now the streaming platform has upped the ante in its “cruelty is the point” Roast of Kevin Hart by tossing MAGA comics in with mainstream comics like Hart, Handler, and Davidson. The good news is that the mainstreamers hit the streamers back just as hard—and it’s pretty clear that they’ve been holding back for a long time.
News leaked after the roast that Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che abruptly dropped out at the last minute, citing scheduling conflicts. On his Instagram account, he wrote: “White guys and Black people joke different. Black guy roast like, ‘look at this n—’s shoes!’ White roasts are like, ‘Slavery, math, slain teens, sex crimes, slurs, family secrets.’ White guys don’t give a fuck about they shoes.” He added, “Let’s do a roast celebrating the career of the most successful Black comic in the last 10 years,” In a separate post, he wrote: “I love that! Who should we get to write it?” On the next slide, Che added a photo of the five white joke writers hired by Gillis—Nick Mullen, J.P. McDade, Mike Lawrence, Dan St. Germain, and Zac Amico.
Che is in no ways squeamish about trading charged racial barbs on SNL—he does it on the regular with his white “Weekend Update” cohost Colin Jost. So it’s abundantly clear that in programing the Hart roast in such a way that Che was happy to bow out, Netflix’s comedy-production team really went south in the worst possible way.
Ben SchwartzTwitterBen Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other publications. His Bluesky address is @benschwartz.bluesky.social.