Kevin Hart's "Apologies" Surface In Wake Of Oscars Controversy

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Kevin Hart’s “Apologies” Surface In Wake Of Oscars Controversy

As you likely already know, Kevin Hart’s position as host of the 91st Academy Awards Ceremony fell through after he refused to apologize for some crusty old tweets where he made homophobic statements and used gay slurs. The comedian claimed he had addressed these old jokes multiple times, and wouldn’t be apologizing over and over again for the same thing.

The issue is, now that the dust has settled on his hosting gig, people are now going back and digging for Kevin’s “multiple instances of addressing it” the same way they did for the original offensive tweets, per his suggestion.

It appears that the reason people are having such a hard time finding Kevin’s multiple previous apologies…is because he doesn’t seem to have actually made them. Kevin has mentioned that he wouldn’t tell or post those sorts of homophobic jokes…but only because he doesn’t want to hear it out of anyone who may be offended — not because it was wrong or in poor taste, or whatever.

The interviewer in his 2015 profile for Rolling Stone asked Kevin about the homophobia in his comedy, and Kevin only stated that people were too sensitive for those jokes nowadays and explicitly said he would NOT apologize for things he said on Twitter:

Going back a bit further, in 2014, interviewer Ed Gordon asked Kevin about disparaging jokes he’d made about darker skinned Black women and about homosexuals. In a long-buried interview unearthed by TMZ, Ed asked why the comedian suddenly drew the line at homosexual jokes but NOT at Black women’s expense. His short answer…offending the LGBTQ community can ruin your career:

So never did he say jokes and statements like that were wrong, nor that he regrets hurting anyone with them, or that he shouldn’t have made them (he FLAT OUT didn’t issue an apology to Black women, by the way) prior to his eleventh-hour apology on Thursday night. Instead, it sounds like he has simply expressed that doesn’t want the smoke that comes with jokes like that.

What do you think? After addressing the issue in these ways in the past, was Kevin right to refuse to “keep apologizing” for his old tasteless statements? Did he take a stand in the right way?

Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images / Getty