Kevin Hart says Wanda Sykes helped him understand why his old anti-LGBTQ+ jokes were harmful

Kevin Hart is once again shouting out Wanda Sykes for helping him understand why his past anti-LGBTQ+ jokes were harmful.

The 44-year-old comedian, who was recently awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, sat down with Anderson Cooper in January for a profile that aired last weekend on 60 Minutes.

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Comedian Kevin Hart says he learned “necessary” lesson from backlash over homophobic jokes

“Sometimes it’s okay to take a step back and to be educated.”

The segment briefly touched on the controversy that erupted after it was announced in December 2018 that Hart would host the 2019 Academy Awards. Soon after, old anti-gay tweets — including one in which he joked about beating his son with a dollhouse — and homophobic jokes from previous comedy specials surfaced on social media, leading to outcry from the LGBTQ+ community and allies. Hart initially refused to apologize, insisting that he was not homophobic and that the jokes no longer reflected his views.

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Days later, he announced that he was bowing out of the Oscars gig, apologizing “to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past” and adding that he was continuing to evolve. But he undermined his own apology significantly during a January 2019 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in which he vented his frustration at being labeled homophobic and his resentment of social media users who brought his anti-gay jokes to light.

On 60 Minutes, Cooper questioned Hart about his immediate reaction to the controversy. “Initially you didn’t to apologize, later on you did,” the out host said.

Hart responded that “later on, the understanding came from the best lightbulb ever.”

“Wanda Sykes said, ‘There’s people that are being hurt today because of comments like the ones that you made then, and there’s people that were saying it’s OK to make those comments today based off of what you did then,’” Hart recalled. “It was presented to me in a way where I couldn’t ignore that. So, in those moments of despair, great understanding and education can come out of it, if you’re given the opportunity.”

This isn’t the first time Hart has credited Sykes with what he described as his “come-to-Jesus moment” in a recent issue of the WSJ Magazine.

“There was a big gap between what I thought the problem was versus what the problem really was,” Hart said in a 2020 interview with Men’s Health. “It wasn’t until close friends like Wanda Sykes, Lee Daniels, and Ellen [DeGeneres] talked to me and explained what they didn’t hear me say that I understood. Then I was like, ‘Oh, sh*t — I did f**k up.’”

Shortly after his controversial appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, he apologized again on his own Sirius XM radio show, Straight from the Hart.

“We thought it was okay to talk like that, because that’s how we talked to one another. In that, you go, f**k! This is wrong now,” he said of his anti-gay jokes. “Now we’re in a space where I’m around people of the LGBTQ community, and I’m now aware of how these words make them feel, and why they say, ‘That sh*t hurt because of what I’ve been through.’”

In the WSJ Magazine profile last month, he seemed to regret his initial resentment of the backlash. “Sometimes it’s okay to take a step back and to be educated,” he said of the controversy. “I got a crash course. It was one that was necessary and needed.”