July 31--In ego-fueled world of stand-up comedy, size matters. "Chicago, we sold this place out for three shows," the diminutive but blowing-up Kevin Hart crowed from the stage of the United Center around midnight on Thursday, his fans waving back and cheering from the crammed rafters. "You're trying to make me feel tall," said Hart.
The arena is to the stand-up comedian what the stadium for the rock star. Only a very select group can fill them.
Hart is not the only stand-up to play the United Center -- the British comic Eddie Izzard booked the joint, as have a couple of others in recent years. Still, I was at the Izzard show and there were far more people watching Hart, even though this was a late-night show that ended around 1:30 a.m. Friday, a day when a lot of Hart fans presumably had to go to work. (Hart was running some kind of 5K race Friday.)
Quite a day. By the end of Friday night, with 30 hours in town, the 36-year-old Hart will surely have sold some 50,000 tickets for his hour-long set. At an average price well in excess of $100. Without playing a Saturday night. You do the math. That's a stand-up feat without any equal I can recall in Chicago.
And this was achieved without Hart offering any formal press access to the show, always a sign of a desire for control and of plenty of cash money already in the bank.
Hart's popularity also suggests that the networks maybe missed their chance to answer those calls for diversity in late-night TV by picking Hart, although Hart's movie paydays may now eclipse any of the charms of one of those quotidian jobs. Still, the set for his "What Now?" tour is one of those TV-like cityscape backgrounds -- on Thursday night (and Friday morning) it was the Chicago skyline, an homage that presumably changes with every city on the tour. Hart said that the tour's title came from the most frequent question he got asked. That was a smart bit of branding, implying the man has options. And so he does.
He also tightly controls his environment. Not a single phone flashed at Hart during his show -- which blew me away -- and was a consequence of the audience being told, and then told again, that any single appearance of a smartphone would result in them being kicked out of the venue. In fact, one of the three supporting comics (collectively known as the Plastic Cup Boyz) at the show basically based his entire routine around the consequences of pulling out your phone. "Fifty people got kicked out at the last show," he said before riffing on the different racial reactions to the moment when security might tap you on your shoulder. That security force kept training lights on the crowd, looking for phones, which felt uncomfortably authoritarian to say the least. But it achieved its goal. In the very last moments of the show, when Hart stood on stage with the lights turned up, celebrating his popularity among so many different kinds of folks, he magnanimously said that the phones could come out, as if that had not been his policy in the first place. The man has control.
Actually, his routine, which is very funny, tightly written and deft at keeping the stakes high, is centered on his own alpha-male persona.
At the late show Thursday, Hart started with one of those first-world problems: the lack of lights in his own driveway and his use of the dark as a teachable moment for his wimpy son. Hart has a lot of fun with his kid going to private school, which has turned him into a "black-white" young man. It's very funny material, although it would be better yet if Hart went the next step and talked about who sent that kid to such a school, and why. But then the comedian is not into such dangerous vulnerability -- he projects more the guy whose career is blowing up in Hollywood and who has to stay the master of his own universe, not only surviving the lack of bona fides of his own preppy kid, but also the dad who call Siri, Sirus. Given that Hart's prime demographic is couples in their 30s, of all of that material lands. It's tough to stay in charge.
Hart, though, is now big enough for fame to intrude on his own personal comfort -- which probably explains the hilarious recounting of a story about a raccoon trying break into his house, and fake-shooting him through the glass doors to his garden. A stand-in, a shrink would say, for the world at large. That's coupled with a similarly funny anecdote about a fan discovering him in a mens' toilet while Hart was seated and minding his own business, only to watch a smartphone come over the door of the stall. No wonder the man hates phones.
Hart kept coming back to fear, actually -- and the show always was better when he did, being as that material was far edgier than more predictable stuff about Starbucks linguistics or scatological realities.
At one moment, maybe his best moment, Hart talked of a dream of someone he loved being attacked by an animal he could not beat, which led him to a wildly inventive bit of material involving what happens when your shoulder is bitten off: "You can't be cold. You can't shiver. No one would believe you."
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
