LOOKS LIKE HE MADE IT
Comic Steve Harvey set a goal for himself when he was 10 years old and now he's living the dream
“I'm way beyond where I thought I'd be,” Steve Harvey said. “How could I see myself having a life that I didn't even know existed? I didn't even know this was on the ticket.” The 65-year-old tried to sum up his life and career during a recent Zoom interview. “How in the world?” the comedian added, shaking his head.
This is the how — sort of. Because breaking down Harvey's story is a Herculean task: How the kid from Ohio with a speech impediment would one day have six different TV shows airing in a single calendar year. How the man who made gigantic rainbow-coloured suits his trademark is now on the cover of Paper magazine, achieving fashion icon and senior citizen status at the same time. How the guy who flunked out of Kent State University became a “judge.”
“I hated the process, but when I look back on it, everything you're going through is preparing you for what you asked God for,” Harvey said with all the sincerity of someone who's been through it and come out the other side. When Harvey was 10, he wrote a secret wish on a piece of paper: I want to be on TV. There was only one problem: He had a stutter. By college, he conquered the stutter but was no closer to becoming a TV star. He headed to Kent State University. Grades were less of a concern than cracking jokes.
Meanwhile, another college classmate was planting seeds.
Arsenio Hall and Harvey spent hours on the basketball court together. “Steve had this infectious smile. He was hilarious, and you knew it then,” Hall said. “He didn't do characters, he didn't do impressions, he would just talk. You would have to tell Steve `Stop, stop!' because he would have you hurting.”
Fast-forward nearly five years, and Harvey was at home in Cleveland getting ready for the midnight shift of a dead-end job.
“I hated my life,” he said. Solid Gold was playing on the TV in the background, and before Harvey walked out the door, he caught the host of the variety show announce its newest comedian: Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Cleveland, Arsenio Hall.
“It's him, and he's killing, man, but I'm not laughing at anything. I went to work that night and I was in misery because this dude had did it,” Harvey said. “From that moment on I thought of nothing except how do I get on TV.”
Harvey, who was selling life insurance, took a side gig selling jokes at $10 a pop to a buddy he made laugh.
That friend was killing down at the local comedy club with Harvey's stuff.
The next week, Harvey himself stepped up to the mike for the first time, won amateur night and cried the entire ride home.
Harvey left his family — a wife and twin daughters — to hit the comedy circuit, scratching out a meagre living. He lived in his car for three years. What kept him going was an unshakable belief in himself and in God.
“When you ask God for something and you believe he's going to give it to you, the thing is he never tells you when it's going to happen.
Because if he gave you the date, you wouldn't need faith, you'd just need patience, and he requires our faith. And I had no plan B.”
In time, the small clubs would lead to HBO'S Def Comedy Jam. In 1993, Harvey landed Showtime at the Apollo and hosted the famed talent show for the next seven years. The Steve Harvey Show, which aired for six seasons, premièred on the WB network in 1996. Then in 2000 came The Kings of Comedy, one of the highest-grossing comedy tours ever. His radio show was next, then the daytime talk show, the prime time specials, the hit movies based on his New York Times bestseller Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. He resuscitated Family Feud in 2010 and a decade later also took it to South Africa and Ghana, where it's wildly popular.
But he still wouldn't call himself “self-made” or bulletproof. Mistakes have been made. Very public ones. Remember the Miss Universe mix-up? The time he disparaged Asian men as being romantically undesirable on his talk show? When he joked with a caller from Flint, Mich., on his radio show to “enjoy your nice brown glass of water?”
“As you make these incremental steps in life, you get a little bit higher, and after you climb each step, your goals become a bit more lofty. It's a different view from up there,” Harvey said. “That's what happens. You have to have a different target, but my aim is always up.”
When you ask God for something and you believe he's going to give it to you, the thing is he never tells you when it's going to happen.