Sheryl Underwood said it’s natural for people to be upset by Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis’ Kevin Hart roast joke that centered on the late George Floyd and race.
Underwood spoke on “Entertainment Tonight” Thursday about Netflix’s controversial “The Roast of Kevin Hart.” Some criticized it as crossing the line into bad taste – Hinchcliffe in particular joking about Floyd and Gillis joking about Hart’s “lynching”.
“Right now, George Floyd is looking at all of us and laughing so hard he can’t breathe,” Hinchcliffe said during the roast.
Gillis, for his part, poked fun at Hart’s height, saying, “Kevin’s so short he’s going to have to lynch him from a bonsai tree.”
“I think people should be angry about the George Floyd jokes and the bonsai jokes,” Underwood said.
“I want to know what’s in your brain that you think is okay,” she said of the comedian.
“I personally said to Tony Hinchcliffe, ‘We’ve got to do a deal with the Floyd family, and they’ll cooperate,'” she added. “I’m talking about someone’s relative. It’s not that the jokes aren’t well written, but this generation of roasts and comics do things that most people would consider to be in poor taste, but still make you laugh.”
During the roast, Hinchcliffe and Gillis also joked about Underwood’s late husband, who committed suicide. The former “The Talk” host and her husband, whose name has not been disclosed, had been married for three years before he took his own life in 1990.
Underwood was seen laughing in the audience at the time, but she told ET the joke was “in bad taste.” She also said two comedians called her beforehand and told her they were going to talk about her late husband.
“I had a chance to speak to Tony Hinchcliffe and he told me where he was going and then Shane Gillis called me and we talked about it,” she said. “They came in respectfully, but we didn’t know exactly what they were going to say.”
She said of her reaction to them, “Like when they told me about how they were coming at me, I said, ‘They better be funnier.'”
Chelsea Handler, who is good friends with Hart and attended the roast, accused Hinchcliffe and Gillis of being “racist, bigots and sexists” on Wednesday’s episode of the podcast “Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You.”
“I don’t think that joke is funny,” she said. “Lynching a black person is no joke. It’s worse than rape.”
“I thought it was going to be a terrible atmosphere because there was so much hate,” she added of the roast.
But Gillis, through his agent, hit back in a statement: “This is a big moment for Chelsea. I’m glad she took advantage of the opportunity. Good for her.”
“We are all rooting for her,” the statement continued. “Anyway, come see me at the Philadelphia football stadium on July 17th.”
“Saturday Night Live” star Michael Che, who reportedly pulled out of Hart’s roast, also publicly criticized the event on his Instagram Story.
“‘Let’s toast to the most successful black comic career of the past decade,'” he wrote. “‘I love it so much! Who should I ask to write it?'”
In the next slide, Choi shared an image of five white men who were part of Gillis’ writing team.
He also posted, “White men and black men joke differently. Black men go wild and say, ‘Look at those shoes!'” White Roast is like “Slavery, Mathematics, Murdered Teens, Sex Crimes, Slander, and Family Secrets.” ”
