Kevin Hart on offence, awards shows and Jo Koy: ‘Those rooms can be cold. I don’t consider them good gigs’
Hold on,” says Kevin Hart, dialling a number on his mobile phone. If, for some reason, I’d needed convincing of the comedian’s full-on lifestyle, I am about to get it. We’re sitting in an otherwise vacant hotel room in central London, but Hart’s head is already back stateside; I listen as he asks some unseen aide to send over various details about an imminent trip to Boston, Massachusetts. It’s the kind of urgent-seeming, hang-on-I-have-another-call-coming-in aside that you might expect from a man who has built, over the past two decades, his own corporate empire: his production company Hartbeat, founded in 2009, sits alongside his own streaming network (Laugh Out Loud) and a venture capital firm in his lucrative portfolio.
Venture capital? Corporate empire? These are hardly the sort of words that accompany profiles of . But “comedian” doesn’t really do justice to a person whose Instagram page has more followers than the populations of most countries (178 million). Today, I’m
