I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons

by Kevin Hart

In that moment, I understood that I had been given the slot I deserved. I wasn’t good enough yet. In the small bubble of the Laff House and the Philly comedy scene, maybe I stood out. But it was like standing out in a high school play. It wasn’t the real world of entertainment. The stage I was on at these tiny clubs was the size of a subcompact parking space. This was a real venue, with a stage the size of a barn. I was a long way from being able to perform on this scale and at this level of professionalism, even as an opening act. As humbled as I was, I knew one thing: I needed to somehow get from here to there.

Watching the Def Jam show from behind the scenes filled me with an ambition that I’d never felt before. It raised the ceiling on what I thought was possible and where this all could lead. As we walked out, I thought, I gotta get it together so I can be here one day. For the first time, I didn’t just have a path I was excited to be on. I had a destination.

However, you want to have a relationship with the audience, and the name you were born with is going to have more depth and authenticity than a character you made up.”

“Stop being a dummy. Your job as a person with talent is to make yourself interesting after the audience hears your name. Define the person who was just introduced.” “How do you do that?” “It’s simple, stupid. You be yourself. When they say Kevin Hart, your first words should be ‘Hey, what’s going on? My name is Kevin Hart. I’m happy to be here.’ ”

And that’s when I got it: I could be funny for ten minutes at my best. Same with most of the other new guys on the scene. But when Keith started talking, you felt like you could listen to him for hours. He wasn’t delivering material or playing characters. He was just being himself—it was a radical concept.

“The main thing is to come from the heart,” he went on. “Say something that matters, rather than stuff you think the crowd wants to hear, and you won’t go wrong—even if it doesn’t go over well. All that matters is you.” “But what should I do to make that stuff funny without pandering?” “Just tell the truth, then work your way to funny from there. When you let them in on what’s really going on with you, you’ll automatically find the jokes in your life.” “What’s an example of someone who does that?” “Look at Richard Pryor. That’s why he’s still unanimously the number one comic. Sometimes life is brutal, and he isn’t afraid to come out with his truth and say it. And when he changes his mind about things, he isn’t afraid to tell people he doesn’t feel the same way anymore. Just speak what you know, dummy. I lived in the projects back in 1980, but they’re not the same now. So I don’t speak about them and pretend like I know what it’s like to grow up there today.”

“If you have pretty girls in the audience, you don’t want to bomb in front of them. And a black crowd will give you a nice booing. But you have to look at the bigger picture, which is growth. I’ve been through all the stuff you’re going through and had the same worries, so trust me when I tell you that you’re going to get worse at first and then you’re going to get better. Much better.”

I felt like I was at war with myself.

Wait, man, what’s the point of even doing this if I can’t be me? What I should do is stop using you like a crutch and trust that I’m likeable and funny just as I am, whether I’m talking to one person or a hundred.

It was like an epiphany or an exorcism or a punch in the back of my damn head.

I realized that what these guys had been picking up on the whole time was people trying too hard. It was exactly what Keith and TuRae had told me I needed to stop doing. And because these guys were predators—trained to sniff out and pounce on the slightest vulnerability—they were more attuned to weakness than even the most discerning comedy crowd. I was surviving this only because, for the first time in my short comedy career, I wasn’t trying. I was just being.

It is through our most extreme experiences that the biggest growth happens—if we survive them. That night, I learned how to be vulnerable on stage.

right: I wasn’t ready. I still knew nothing about the art of comedy. The problem was not Keith’s slowness. It was my impatience. I recognized that I had a lot of work to do to get to that level. Instead of thinking about getting on stage in New York, I needed to think about removing, rewriting, reconstructing, shifting, and shaping every phrase in my set, examining every nuance from my tonality to my gestures. One of the comics who had this perfected was named JB Smoove. He was very animated, and before he even opened his mouth, audience members already knew they were going to have a good time and bust up laughing. As I worked to sharpen my act at my Philly shows, I tried to focus on what was naturally funny about me.

Cultivating the ability to listen to advice I didn’t want to hear, objectively evaluate it, and know when to implement it didn’t come naturally to me. I had to learn it the hard way, from someone who was very difficult to listen to. It was one of the most valuable gifts Keith gave me.

I often speak about the value of hard work, but hard work is not enough. I’ve seen many people sabotage their career before it’s even started by refusing to do anything unless they’re compensated or rewarded directly for it. Or they become bitter, expecting that they’ll be rewarded in exchange for just working hard. One of the key factors for success—beyond work, talent, timing, relationships, and all the other qualities I’ve mentioned—is the glue that holds all of these together: commitment. What is commitment? Here’s what it means to me: keeping the promises you make to yourself and to others. I promised my mother I’d figure out a way to survive in comedy. I promised myself I’d find a road out of Philadelphia and on to bigger opportunities. I promised Keith I’d trust him and stick with the process. All three of these promises turned out to be much harder, and take much longer to keep, than I’d expected. I still wasn’t surviving on my own. I still wasn’t getting big opportunities. I still wasn’t done with Keith’s mentorship. I was still spending more than thirty hours a week getting to and from and around New York just for that five minutes on stage on Sundays. Though my sleep, time, finances, relationship, and even my patience and self-esteem were negatively impacted and I wanted to quit many times, I remained committed. That’s the biggest difference between the amateur and the professional, between the wannabe and the star, between the dabbler and the expert. The unsucc...

Eventually, I landed auditions at two more clubs, Stand Up NY and Gotham Comedy Club. I passed them both and was soon performing in New York more regularly, although I wasn’t going up until one in the morning sometimes, to play what they called “food spots.” What this meant was that instead of getting cash for performing, I got a hamburger and a Coke.

To succeed, you have to see how good you’re capable of becoming before anybody else sees it. I’m one of those people that see it, and that’s all you need: just a couple people backing you who believe in you.”

My thought was: New York is so big, and there are so many places to perform spread out across the city and beyond, why not just do them all? I never turned down anything. Sometimes I got sent away. Sometimes I got burnt. Sometimes I traveled seven hours to do a college show where no one laughed and I wasn’t paid. But not once could anyone say that I didn’t try. The comics who made it from that time were the ones who felt the same way and thought: I’m not above this place or these people. No one is. I’m here to get on stage—any stage. If you grind without that mentality, then you’re wasting your time.

Once you know the rules of the game, you can play it. If you don’t know the rules, you’ll always lose.

But from it, I learned that trusting your gut in situations where your logic contradicts you is terrifying—especially the first time you do it—but it’s always the right move.

I was learning to treat everything as if it were a high priority, because that next meeting or show or dinner just might be the one where you get what you’ve been looking for. It just takes one person to say one thing, and your whole life can change. If success happens in part by chance, then the more you expose yourself to it, the luckier you will be. I worked hard in order to get lucky.

“What are the next steps?” I asked. “Just keep getting stronger in comedy. The best way to get the right people’s attention is to hone your craft. Your stand-up is going to open up all the doors you need.”

More often than not, I eventually got those spots, those rooms, those auditions, and those nights, until I was going to New York every day. I was successful not because I was the most talented person they’d seen and not even because I was the most persistent person they’d seen; I have no doubt that there were people more talented, more persistent, and harder working than me. But there was one other thing that gave me the winning edge, and will always give you the winning edge: being likeable.

In always respecting and acknowledging people as equals going through their own struggles, whether their status in the room was higher or lower than mine, I noticed a side effect: Eventually, I wasn’t grinding alone anymore. Comedians, bookers, bartenders, and waiters started telling me about openings and opportunities.

The toughest transition is the transition to understanding that being yourself is all you need to be.

IN WHICH I DISCOVER THAT I’M NOT ACTUALLY AS GOOD AS I THOUGHT, WHICH THEN PUTS ME ON THE PATH TO BECOMING AS GOOD AS I THOUGHT

Even though I’d changed my name and tightened my set and started writing from my own perspective, I was still making up jokes instead of sharing personal experiences. On the way home that night, I went through my set with Keith, and he demolished just about everything. It was my own private hack court.

“Here’s what you gotta do, dummy. Go home and think about the answer. Look at what’s actually happening in your life, so you can talk about it on stage.” “There’s nothing happening. I just travel back and forth to New York all the time.” “Man, you really are a big dummy. The answer is staring you right in the face.”

“Every time we’re in the car, you’re telling me about all this shit you’re going through with her and getting mad cause I’m laughing at your dumb ass. But it is funny. Problems are funny. You think you’re the only one in the world that’s going through relationship problems, dummy? How many guys will breathe a sigh of relief if they can look at their woman during your set and say, ‘See, we ain’t the only ones who get like that. There’s other couples that’s crazy too.’ ”

I understood then what Keith had meant about the audience needing to know who I was. All along, I’d been trying to write jokes. This was another level: I was finding my pain points and transforming them into something that could touch and maybe even help other people. An entertainer makes you laugh, I realized, but an artist makes you understand.

What they were laughing at was my reactions. The humor was in my uniqueness, my personality—not the way I saw life, but the way I did life. That was the payoff; that’s where I struck gold. For the first time, I could see it wasn’t my jokes or my delivery or my ideas that were funny. I was actually funny.

The smallest thing could turn into a hilarious story if I noticed that my response to it was way out of proportion.

Dame was the first real doer I’d met: He didn’t overthink things or try to make them perfect or worry about everything that could go wrong. He just made things happen.

As I studied my lines before the first day of shooting, it struck me as ironic that the guy who hated tests more than anyone in school had ended up with a career that required him to study and memorize things on a regular basis.

But Dave was right: The shoulder-shrugging kept it from leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

A lot of my philosophy is that life is about making the right choices in the dark. Many people ask me what to do if they have doubts about their career or how talented they are or what their passion is. My answer: When it comes to the future, it’s impossible to have any certainty. I may appear to be certain, because I’ve learned to have confidence in my abilities and faith in my will to succeed. But what I don’t know—and what no human being knows—is how we will fulfill our destiny as individuals and what that destiny will be. If you wait for certainty, you will spend your whole life standing still. And if you grow discouraged and give up when things get rough, you’ll miss out on your best possible destiny. So the secret is to be excited about what is in your power to control, be accepting of what’s not in your power to control, and then move with certainty into an uncertain future.

Every experience is a potential life lesson. Even if you don’t appreciate it at the time, each struggle in the present is preparing you for something else in the future.

But I was starting to understand that auditions were less about nailing the part and more about nailing the casting agent. Some of those parts weren’t for me; in other cases, they already had someone they liked in the part. The goal was to shine and to win over the casting agent, so that when the roles that were right for me came along, and I was further along in my career, they’d remember me.

The goal was to break the tension and get them laughing, but without trying too hard. I’d still work to embody the part. Even if the role wasn’t for me, I wanted them to see how prepared I was and what I was capable of. I’d mix it up and play the character in ways that weren’t right for the film, just to show them that I had different levels.

Though people say to live in the moment, each moment leads to other moments. So treat each moment like a seed, and care for it so that something beautiful can grow from it. That Ray kid you joked around with when he was just starting out may become a studio head ten years later, and will remember that you noticed him and treated him special.

“Smoke with your unc,” Snoop said, handing me his blunt. “Come on, nephew.”

“How high are we trying to get? Because I think I’m there.”

Snoop got me so high that I forgot how to open my eyes.

Why did I do this? I’m an East Coast guy, I shouldn’t be fucking with the West Coast. Maybe they can just write a part into the script where I get blinded by exhaust from the plane. Do planes even have exhaust pipes? Fuck, I’m so high. I want my mom. Oh, there she is.

That fucking nose-smoker! I’d just introduced his snot to my digestive system. I got even more paranoid. My dick started itching. I began to worry that I’d caught something from him. It started spreading. I couldn’t see, and my whole body was itching. I scratched my chest. It felt like there were sores everywhere. I mean, why was he smoking through his nose? Probably because he had some disease in his mouth. I was done. All I remember about the filming that day was that when I climbed the ramp to get to eye level with Sofía Vergara, I fell off. That was my first and last time smoking with Snoop.

Here’s what happens when a movie you play the lead in bombs at the box office and a sitcom you star in gets canceled midseason: You become poison. No one in Hollywood wants you in any of their productions, because they feel that anything with you in it is going to be toxic. Up to this point, my whole career had been a climb—sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but always uphill. Now that it was plummeting, I didn’t know what the next step was supposed to be. I hadn’t considered that failure was a possibility. Instead of shrugging, my shoulders began to sag. “What happens now?” I kept asking Dave. “What do we do?” “Pilot season is right around the corner. We’ll go out and book you something.” “So I’m just supposed to wait?” “Don’t worry about it. Everything will be okay.” I couldn’t tell anymore if Dave was my manager or my therapist. Every day, I called him, trying to get something going. But no one in the industry wanted to meet with me. All those casting agents and producers who I thought I’d been charming left and right suddenly had no interest. Everyone in the business had moved on to the next New Face from that year’s Just for Laughs. I was an Old Face now. In Hollywood, just like in relationships, it’s easier to get a first chance than a second chance.

They say that bad news comes in threes. I don’t know who said that, but they got their math wrong. I think it’s that you’re in either an upward or a downward phase of your life. And if you’re going down, bad news comes more than three times. It’s just that after three, you stop keeping count because it’s so familiar. It’s like counting how many socks you own. My third sock came from the worst possible person: the one handling my money. Business Manager: I just got off the phone with the IRS. They need you to pay your back taxes. Me: Taxes? Don’t they take those out of my checks? Business Manager: Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. It depends on whether you’re being paid as an employee or an independent contractor. Me: Huh? Business Manager: I’ll just cut right to it: You only have $30,000 in your account. Me: So pay my taxes with some of that. Business Manager: Kevin, you owe almost $400,000. Me: Wait, what? The last time I’d done a Wait, what?—which is much bigger than a regular What?—was probably when my dad told me he was leaving my mom.

Struggling when you’re going somewhere is exciting. Struggling when you’re not getting anywhere is challenging. But struggling when you’re going backward is hell.

I was talented. I was funny. I was likeable. I was experienced. Yet none of those things was doing me any good. I was wasting my life away in clubs where I couldn’t afford the drinks anymore. I was, I had to admit—for perhaps the first time in my life—doing everything wrong.

That’s when I learned the biggest lesson of all: humility. In the depths of my disappointment and failure, I understood that nothing in this life is guaranteed. One day you’re hot, the next you’re not. One day you’re rich, the next you’re poor. One day you’re free, the next you’re in jail. One day you’re alive, the next you’re dead. You can work hard. You can be talented. You can know all the right people. You can follow all the right lessons. You can be smart, rich, beautiful, everything—and still, life can deal you a bad hand.