Kevin Hart’s Markie

Comedy, they say, is hard. I believe them. Over the past 25 years, I’ve judged a lot of journalism contests and am often assigned to column categories. About two-thirds of the newspaper columnists in this country think they are funny. Nearly all of them are wrong.

They are so wrong that sometimes I think it is almost impossible to be funny in a newspaper. Then I’ll come across a Dave Barry piece. Dave Barry is funny.

But even Dave Barry knows it’s hard to be funny in a newspaper. Dave Barry doesn’t try to be funny two or three times a week anymore. “Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times best-selling author and actual Florida Man Dave Barry” picks his spots these days because he’s 76 and his GDP is slightly larger than Ecuador’s.

And because comedy is hard, even for the genuinely funny.

So let’s give Kevin Hart his props; he recently won The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, presented by Wells Fargo, despite not being genuinely funny. It’s an opinion apparently shared by his frequent costar Regina King who, in her remarks at the ceremony held last week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., noted, “Kevin really cares … about the quality of the check, not the project. Some of that s*** is pretty bad, but you know what? This man makes a lot of money.”

She kids. The ceremony was set up as a roast so they could turn it into streaming content. (It will premiere on Netflix on May 11.)

It’s only funny because it’s true. That’s one of the things that makes comedy hard. Comedians have to be honest, or at least steal honest jokes.

I have not delved deep into Hart’s oeuvre, but he has been a ubiquitous presence on the cultural scene for two decades or so. I’ve never liked him in a movie or a Capital One commercial, though have wondered if he wouldn’t make a good dramatic actor.

I have heard him interviewed more than a few times, usually on sports talk programs (Hart is a sports fan, who despite being 60 inches tall once aspired to play professional basketball, and as a teenager went to basketball camp with Kobe Bryant) and while I often find him loud and annoying on these shows (I find everyone loud and annoying on these shows; these are loud and annoying shows) he did tell a story on himself that made me feel kindly toward him.

It was about the first film he was in. He studied the script, and on the first day of shooting was prepared to deliver his lines. He hit his mark. He delivered his line. But …

“I had never seen the word ‘facade’ spelled out,” he said on the ‘Mike and Mike” program on ESPN Radio in 2014. So when, in an early movie role, he encountered it in a script, he read his line as, “C’mon man, don’t you see that this is a fa-KAHD?”

“And they were like, ‘Cut!’,” Hart continued. “And I was like, ‘What’s up man, what’s going on?’ And the director came over to me, and he said ‘Kevin, so, um, ah, let me see your [lines], let me see what you got there …’ and I mean, I know my lines, I mean, I’m ready, and he said, ‘What are you saying right here?’ and he pointed to the word. And I said, ‘That’s fa-KAHD!’ And he said, ‘That’s facade.’ And I said, ‘Get out of here.’ ”

From then on, Hart decided to do a lot more ad-libbing in his roles.

This story is relatable; I’ve read and am familiar with words I’ve never heard spoken aloud. I will never attempt to say “synecdoche”—a type of metonymy, a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa, such as “Arkansas” for the “University of Arkansas at Fayette

ville Razorback’s women’s basketball team”—out loud.

I often mispronounce “cavalry” as “Calvary” and vice-versa. I sometimes say “regime” when I mean “regimen.” My excuse is that when I was a toddler living in Rome, N.Y., I jumped out of a swing and into a snow bank that obscured a buried shovel and cut half my tongue off. My parents, after they stopped laughing, packed the tongue in snow and drove me to a hospital where it was re-attached, though the doctors warned I might have a speech impediment that would make it difficult for me to ever pronounce “synecdoche,” “metonymy,” “cavalry” or “regime.”

I do know that the correct pronunciation of “forté” is simply “fort” and that “humble” is pronounced “humble” and not “’umble,” as one of my high school social studies teachers insisted.

I don’t know what Hart’s excuse might be, other than he probably didn’t get a great education growing up with a cocaine addict father in south Philadelphia. His childhood has been characterized as difficult. Now he’s an overachiever whose films have grossed more than $4.23 billion globally. He is also an entrepreneur, the chairman of a vague commercial endeavor called Hartbeat, a global multi-platform media company creating entertainment at the intersection of comedy and culture with a mission to “keep the world laughing together.”

So what if I don’t think he’s funny? I’m looking at the list of previous recipients of the Mark Twain Prize, given to someone who has “had an impact on American society in ways similar to” Twain. The first was Richard Pryor in 1998. OK, genius funny. Pyror definitely fits the criteria. Next up, Jonathan Winters. Yep, Winters was such a pathologically funny person they had a guy standing by with a tranquilizer gun every time he performed. Carl Reiner in 2000 for contributions that go back to writing for “Your Show of Shows.”

Then we have Whoopi Goldberg in 2001. Borderline funny. But she gets one before Bob Newhart (2002), George Carlin (2008) and Steve Martin (2005)? I’m all right with Lily Tomlin (2003) but Lorne Michaels in 2004? He gets credit for “Saturday Night Live.” Still, we’re talking about Mark Twain here, whom Hemingway held responsible for “all modern American literature.”

It is the nature of these things to redefine themselves downward; if you’re giving an annual prize, there are going to be some years where you induct an Ellen DeGeneres. Or a Bill Cosby, whose award you’re going to have to take away a few years later. (Cosby got the Twain Prize in 2009; even Howard Stern was calling him “a bad guy” by 2006.)

Lenny Bruce is dead and therefore ineligible for a lifetime achievement award. Will Ferrell already had a Markie, so why not give one to Hart?

Besides, does anyone care about who gets these prizes unless they’re the one getting them? Or, in the case of Dave Barry, not getting them.

He probably should do more Capital One commercials.