If you haven't watched any of Kevin's standup comedy specials, this book will not interest you much. "Let Me Explain", "Laugh at My Pain" and "I am a grown little man" are 3 of his one-hour comedy specials available on Youtube, (and his new specials can be found on Netflix); and if you haven't watched any of them, I highly recommend you checking them out. I distinctly remember watching "Let Me Explain" when I was in class 11. I was in my closed room, around 1 in the night, practicing some physics questions for an upcoming test, and I thought just 5 mins of youtube for refreshment will do me good. And that was how I ended up watching that one-hour video.
No doubt Kevin is a funny man, but can he write any good? This was one of my starting questions when I started this book. I also actually thought this book will be some light-hearted comedy with 'wisdom' sparkled here and there, but that didn't turn out to be true. You see when I said 'If you haven't watched any of Kevin's standup comedy specials, this book will not interest you much', that was for a reason.
This book is more like a biography with funny bits sprinkled here and there. This book is a retelling of how Kevin Hart grew up, how he managed high school, how was his family life, how was street life to him as a black American, how was student culture in those days, issues like mass school shootings, local drug problems, police brutality, how his comedy career started, how he handled his divorce, etc. These are the things that are talked about in this book. Midway through this book, I even questioned myself that why I, as an Indian, who has nothing to do with the American way of livelihood, am reading this book. The answer was because I knew Kevin through his standup specials first, so the previous establishment of a known person helped me complete this book, or else I might have tossed the book thinking it's not for me, as I expected this book to be a comedy, not a short biography.
Co-written by Kevin Hart and Neil Strauss, this book has 376 pages (excluding acknowledgments, forward and all) divided into 16 chapters. Each chapter deals with certain aspects of his life and a 'lesson to learn' at the end/middle/beginning of each chapter. Written heavily with a 'street American English' tone, some sentences, slangs, and metaphors may be confusing to people who have read only Indian or British English works, however, this is a good book to start if you are trying to learn 'American English'. Also, some customs which Kevin talks of that are ingrained in present-day American culture like modern subtle racism, college application form submission process, etc may appear confusing at first but not too much.
The first 3 chapters or the first 106 pages are about him growing up from school to getting his first job and the rest of the book is about him establishing his comedy career as one of the highest comedians in the world. The writing style throughout the book is a moderate mixture of 'funny' and 'serious' tone, not too much serious to throw the book out, not too much funny that Kevin misses the point he is trying to make. The first 3 chapters, as being about Kevin's childhood are somewhat light-natured, but the rest of the book is pretty serious, from chapter 4 onwards it's all about finding a decent job, switching to local comedy clubs, getting heckled, going to NY for the first time, finding club agents, managing finances, struggling relationships with father and brother, finding movie deals, failing movie deals, signing sitcom deals, failing sitcom deals, finding little success, fighting with girlfriend, cheating on girlfriend, trying to justify the cheating, accepting his wrong in cheating, marrying and having children with her, finding movie deals again, doing comedy shows for other people, performing abroad for the first time, fighting and divorcing with the girlfriend, finding another girlfriend, trying to keep relationship with children from the previous girlfriend, finding success, doing international shows, doing movies that find international success, and much more. From chapter 4 onwards, slowly but surely things get serious in the book, though with a funny tone.
And honestly, Kevin actually goes deep into how comedy club culture works and his struggle with it. I had seen Abhisekh Upmanyu, Akash Gupta, Zakir Khan and thought damn their life must be funny, I mean I knew their life had struggles too, but in general, I thought damn that's a good profession they are in. However, once I saw this video on youtube of Bassi breaking down one of his comedy sketches I got a little understanding of how writing comedy may be a little harder than I actually thought it to be. And this book by Kevin is the final nail in the coffin of me realizing that building a career in comedy is as hard as building a career in anything else. There are a lot of 'behind-the-scenes' things that Kevin talks about here, like managing and finding comedy clubs, doing paid and unpaid comedy, setting comedy specials to production companies, etc which really made it worth reading for me.
What I like about this book and am thus bothering enough to write this review is that how much of what Kevin writes is true to life. Unlike other biographies/auto-biographies which use the struggles in their life to push a subtle narrative of "see, I was very very poor, my family was really bad, but I worked continuously and got success", this book doesn't do that. This book has a natural rhythm to it similar to real life, you struggle sometimes, sometimes people actually help you in those struggles, sometimes not, sometimes close ones betray you, so you stop interacting with them, but then they change over time and you change too, and sometimes you forgive some of the close ones and rebuild the bond, sometimes you don't, sometimes you rebuild the bond but they fuck up again, so you get upset a bit, screw up your work a bit, but then find the track again; this is what Kevin depicts throughout the book. There's no "success" narrative of "I worked hard and hard and then people noticed me and then I succeded" being pushed here, it's more like "Yah, I guess that bad thing happened, but this good thing happened too, but I have to keep moving forward anyway, isn't it?'.
Final note - Read it if you have got enough time and curiosity to read a comic's life because in all honesty, this is a biography, not a comedy book.
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