On Sunday night, Netflix’s Roast of Kevin Hart crossed most of the lines it set out to cross. Hart’s cheating scandal was fair game. So was Charlie Kirk’s death, Chelsea Handler’s dinner with Jeffrey Epstein and Dwayne Johnson’s suggestion that Hart’s wife deserved an Academy Award for her bedroom performance.
One joke, however, did not make the final cut. It was about Melania Trump.
The axed line came from comedy writer Madison Sinclair, who shared her cut material with Variety after the special aired. It was aimed at Tony Hinchcliffe, the MAGA comedian best known for calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at a Trump rally in 2024. It read: “Tony is like Melania: The only thing relevant about him is that he opened for Trump once.”
The decision behind the cut is the part nobody at Netflix has explained.
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Trump and Melania spent last week publicly demanding that Disney and ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a pre-shooting joke in which he described Melania as having “the glow of an expectant widow.”
Melania labeled the remarks “corrosive” and posted on X that Kimmel “hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him,” urging the broadcaster to take a stand. Trump added his own demand on Truth Social, insisting Kimmel should be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
What did make the broadcast was far more aggressive.
Tom Brady used his set to joke about past “affairs in Las Vegas” while repeatedly catching himself mid-line. Dwayne Johnson delivered one of the night’s biggest reactions, saying Hart’s wife deserved an Academy Award “for pretending to enjoy sleeping with him.”
Shane Gillis pulled Chelsea Handler into a joke about Jeffrey Epstein. Other segments referenced Charlie Kirk’s death and Hart’s participation in Saudi-backed comedy events.
Tony Hinchcliffe was already a running target during the show, with multiple comedians taking shots at him on stage. The cut joke, by any measure of the evening’s standards, would have been the tamest thing said about him all night.
Streaming platforms have been dealing with questions around Trump family material for a while now. When Netflix released the Roast of Tom Brady in 2024, several jokes about Trump aired without issue. Since then, however, the tone around political comedy has shifted noticeably.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
