It was a routine and utterly predictable turn of events: Comedian Kevin Hart was tapped to host the 2019 Oscars ceremony; some enterprising do-gooder unearthed a few untoward wisecracks made by Hart in times past; Hart then, without quite apologizing, announced he would relinquish the honor because the controversy had become—you guessed it—a “distraction.” “I’m sorry that I hurt people,” he pleaded. “I am evolving and want to continue to do so.”
The offending tweets were deemed homophobic. “Yo,” he tweeted in 2011, “if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head and say n my voice ‘stop thats gay.’” In an interview around the same time, Hart said: “One of my biggest fears is my son growing up and being gay. That’s a fear. . . . Do what you want to do. But me, as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.”
The Scrapbook takes no view on Hart’s culpability or whether he was treated fairly or unfairly. Hollywood prides itself on its moral anarchy and byzantine hypocrisies, and those who brave its minefields must accept the consequences when they get themselves maimed. As for the Oscars, if the whole grotesque ritual were swallowed up into the earth like the Sons of Korah, we wouldn’t miss it.
Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with Hart’s contrite protest: “I am evolving and want to continue to do so.” He didn’t evolve fast enough, was the problem. As the prim opinion writer Alyssa Rosenberg pointed out in the Washington Post, his offenses took place too recently for Hart to claim the passage of time as an ablution.
It’s no wonder so many seemingly successful people in the entertainment industry become drug-dazed paranoiacs. Imagine living in a world in which the tenets of the religion to which you must subscribe are constantly revised and altered, the changes marked by the subject matter of each new sitcom. So rapidly do the industry’s expectations change that Rosenberg is forced to exaggerate the antecedence of its current mania for gay equality: Hart cracked anti-gay jokes, she writes, “13 years after Matthew Shepard’s murder prompted a national conversation about homophobia.” That “national conversation,” recall, was based on the falsehood that Shepard was murdered because he was gay, whereas the evidence strongly suggested that his killers wanted simply to rob him.
The lessons here are pretty clear. (a) Don’t say anything on social media, ever. But (b) if you must crack an edgy or inappropriate joke for all the world to read, have the decency to make it funny.
