If you say something offensive, insensitive, homophobic, can you ever be redeemed? The Academy Awards might’ve said “no,” but Kevin Hart seems to have another answer.
The comedian resigned from a gig hosting the Oscars this year after the resurfacing of his old homophobic tweets, which he has since deleted.
He had addressed and apologized for the tweets before, but in December, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences told him to apologize again or quit. He chose the latter. Now, more than a month after the hostless Oscars, he’s spoken at length to Vulture about the controversy.
Comedy tends to stretch the boundaries of what is appropriate, but there are points at which it goes too far. Hart said, in his mind, the jokes were clearly tongue-in-cheek. His friends explained to him that they were not appropriate, but he wishes someone had gently told him sooner.
It’s hard to say whether Hart was truly ignorant of the effect of his jokes, but it’s true that we’d all be better off with more guidance than anger.
“So, there’s a level of understanding that has to come from everybody,” Hart said, “but nobody wants to relax and breathe. Right now, we live in a time where it’s cool to be angry, where it’s cool to just be irate.”
Hart should never have said what he said, but assailing him a decade after the fact does our society no good. In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Hart said of a 2010 joke about not wanting his son to be gay, “I wouldn’t tell that joke today.”
People love to dig up offensive material on Twitter, though. John Wayne, who has been dead for 40 years, suffered an outrage mob attack against his ghost when someone unearthed an old Playboy interview in which he said a few offensive things. Never mind that the interview was from 1971. Now, some people even want to rename John Wayne Airport just based on that interview.
And last summer, Disney fired “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn after his offensive tweets resurfaced. The company rehired him shortly after, a signal that corporations only care about virtue signaling to the frenetic mob.
But what about individuals? Was Hart’s reaction to the controversy a form of virtue signaling, or is he truly sorry?
He said he chose to step down from the Oscars so he wouldn’t distract from the big night, and he chose not to apologize to the Academy for the tweets because he had done so already. Ten years after his mistakes, he found himself in an impossible position:
“Now, I can say, within growth, within time, and a moment to step away, those that may not look into the 10-year period as growth may be looking for another round of ‘That’s not who I am’ and ‘I’m sorrys.’ Which, OK, I have to understand that. I have to acknowledge that. OK, guys, I’m sorry. But then I didn’t say it right, or it wasn’t said with this and it wasn’t said with that. So now, now you just get confused.”
If we want people to grow and change, we have to let them be apologetic without always questioning their remorse. If we want to live in a world that’s simultaneously kinder and less politically correct, we have to let Hart be sorry.
