The Comic Who Became A Colossus

> His comedy shows sell out football stadiums. His movies have grossed $1.5 billion. He has more Twitter followers than the president. But you may be surprised to learn that Kevin Hart is also a gym rat. And it’s one of the secrets to his head-spinning success.

- Bob Guccione Jr.

IT’S HARD TO PINPOINT THE MOMENT Kevin Hart became a star. Suddenly he was just there, with the baptismal comedy special, prowling the stage, a compact, 5'4" ball of hysterically funny energy, spinning his crowd like cotton candy. We blink—if we even did— and now he’s an A-list movie star, the marquee name on the blockbuster Ride Along movies with Ice Cube, Get Hard with Will Ferrell, and Central Intelligence with Dwayne Johnson, all ridiculous plots and side-crampingly hilarious ious movies. And he has released three movies of his standup shows. And he plays NFL stadiums. Bruce Springsteen plays stadiums. Comedians, until Hart, did not. 

Perhaps Hart pushes himself so hard now because he comes from such humble beginnings. He started his comedy career in a shoe store in Philadelphia, where he was the funny guy cracking up his fellow workers— leading, fortuitously, to his getting tired of being the funniest guy in a shoe store. So he decided to try out his comedy onstage in a local club’s amateur night competition, which he came to win every week, eventually discouraging the club owner enough to cancel the competition, pushing Kevin out of the nest, so to speak, and into New York City’s legendary comedy cauldron.

Torn between playing the top-tier clubs that gave the best exposure but didn’t pay, and the less important clubs that did, he played both, commuting nearly four hours each day from Philadelphia so that no one realized he didn’t live in New York. He was that serious, that singleminded, even then. 

GYM FREAK