Kevin Hart Shares His Grueling Work Schedule | Joe Rogan Experience

When you work out your shit now, I've seen you at the comedy store but only once. Where do you work out your shit? I like to go to random comedy clubs. You know I think I'll go to New York first. New York has always been a home when it comes to building, put some structure within a set that you're trying to figure out. Once I got a skeleton of what I want to do, I'll just go to West Palm. I love that comedy club, The Improv down there and I'll stay for two weeks. Oh really? And just go and run through some jokes. I'll go to Utah. I'll go to Denver. You do like wise guys? Yeah. I'll go to comedy clubs, just random comedy clubs that you wouldn't expect to see me at. But I'll do a hell of a run and the goal is to get out of there with just a foundation. It's not to have a complete set. I just want to get a foundation. So when I'm done getting the foundation, then I'll do a little comedy club run. I'll do a full comedy club run where I just put two or three months in and it's comedy club, comedy club, comedy club and I'm doing seven shows a weekend and people are shocked that I'm there and that I'm doing it. But you know that's my that's my gym. That's how I work. And I end up leaving that period of time with a complete set after the first three or four months that I spent. Now after the comedy club, three or four months on that run, then I take it to like a small theater. I see what my laughter feels like in a small theater and I do a little run in small theaters. And then when I finally feel like it's at a point where I'm getting the laugh consistently and the punch lines are working and I flipped it back frontwards forward every direction. And my story is a real roller coaster and it has an ending where I feel like we get off the roller coaster and we're happy. And you don't feel like you were there for an hour. And then when I go test it out in the arena and if the arena and the last of sounds the way it's supposed to, then I say, OK, I'm ready. If it doesn't, then I'll go back to small theaters and then I'll go to an arena again. So not to that arena sounds the way it's supposed to. Do I say I'm going on tour? So sometimes it takes me about a year, a year and three months, a year and four months. You know, people don't understand how hard it is to develop an hour of stand up material. You know, people act like you just turn on a new hour. It's it's an hour to get to an hour. You're going through four to five hours of bullshit that you thought was funny. Yeah. To come up to that hour that you finally say this is going to be the representation of me this year. Yeah. It's a lot for me to do that, especially at this level. You know, well, especially while you're always doing movies and you're always busy with a bunch of other stuff to stuff. You know, yeah, I mean, you don't take any breaks. Why tour? I actually, you know, when I'm touring, if there's a movie, I make the movie schedule around the tour. So my shooting days will go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Rap Thursday. Maybe have a show Thursday night and then I'm going Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Sometimes no show Sunday, sometimes show Sunday, depending on what the work schedule and the workload for the following week would look like. So I'm implementing that. So when I say I'm out, I'm out. I'm gone. Yeah. So I knocked that movie out in two months. And then when I'm not, that tour schedule shifts. So the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, dedicated the family, dedicated to the office, everything. Then those weekends are touring. But that tour lasts for a year and a half. I mean, this year we did 157 shows on my air responsible tour. Wow. 157 shows before you decided to put it on the Netflix special. Yeah, we did the Netflix, the taping. I think I did it three weeks before we were done. So we were probably at 143 shows. Oh, wow. Then I taped it and finished the tour. Did you always have this kind of structure? Like when did you how did you design this? I'm a thought out individual. Yeah, you seem like I'm a I'm a well thought out individual. Everything is not random. No, everything is planned. If you look at all my stand up specials, there's a two year gap in between them. So the two year gap is because at the end of that second year, my new special should be coming out. When a new special should be coming out, I'm now focusing on what the next special is going to be. So that first year is all development. Like right now, I'm off. I'm not touring. But now I'm mentally in the gym and throwing all the old stuff that I talked about away. That's now thrown out. Can't repeat it. Can't say it. Now it's talking about what the new version of myself is going to be. What do I want the conversation to be? And what's my thinking? And just taking notes. So eventually now I'm going to start just popping up in random comedy clubs and trying to figure out what the next thing is. So by mid mid 20, I'll probably be doing comedy clubs by the end of 20. I should have a full fledged concept of that new hour. And by the beginning of 21, I should be ready to go out with my new hour. End of 21. Film my new hour. Mid 22. That hour would come out. That seems like a schedule a lot of people are doing now. The two year schedule. It's a perfect get. Yeah, that's how I do. I know Louis CK did a year every year and George Carlin did every year. But I think even he said really wasn't the right way. That's tough. A year is tough. Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a shout out to those that can do it. I think that's amazing. I think just for everything that I have going on and all of the different things that my hands are in within the brand, the business, I need to make sure that I'm giving 100 percent to those things so they have the highest opportunity to be successful. Right. If I'm trying to cheat it, then it's going to show. Yeah, it's not going to come out to the best of my ability. And within stand up, you got to you got to fucking magnifying glass on you. You know, you're always being judged off of what you did at one point, just like a musician. You're always judged off of the album that everybody thought was whatever. So the biggest thing for an entertainer, artist, whatever your craft is, is creation. How you recreate yourself, how you constantly showing that you're growing.