The Fatherhood actor said he “personally doesn’t give a sh*t” about cancel culture, before diving into a lengthy conversation about his thoughts on the heavily debated concept in an interview with The Sunday Times.
“When did we get to a point where life was supposed to be perfect? Where people were supposed to operate perfectly all the time? I don’t understand,” he added.
Hart eventually stepped down from hosting and issued an apology to the LGBTQIA+ community, hours after he defiantly said he would not apologize in a video he shared to Instagram, claiming that he’d “addressed this several times” over the years and didn’t feel he needed to do so again.
“I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s,” Hart wrote in a series of tweets.
“With the whole Oscars thing, there was a big gap between what I thought the problem was versus what the problem really was,” he said.
He said that with comedy today, comics can’t express themselves truly without fear of getting canceled.
It’s about the intent behind what you say — there’s an assumption it’s always bad and, somehow, we forgot comedians are going for the laugh…
And when it comes to his tweets, Hart said fans can “go ahead” and pull up his older tweets but they don’t reflect the comedian today.
Hart’s comments came soon after another comedian, Katt Williams, went viral for having a similar conversation with a different take.
He went on to say that the history of “cancel culture” is rooted in minority groups demanding respect from people in positions of privilege and power, as the former are usually the ones being insulted and degraded from the latter.
“I don’t know what people got canceled that we wish we had back.
“At the end of the day, there’s no cancel culture.
The interview went viral almost immediately, with folks on Twitter praising Williams’ thoughtful breakdown of cancel culture and what it truly is: the simple truth that while anyone is allowed to say whatever they want, other people are equally allowed to push back on what they said.