Katt Williams was among the comics and entertainers who piled onto Kevin Hart at The Roast of Kevin Hart, a live Netflix event that aired as part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival and marked the streamer’s latest push to own a format that once belonged to television.
Shane Gillis hosted the roast, which also featured Pete Davidson, Sheryl Underwood, Draymond Green, Tony Hinchliffe, Chelsea Handler and Dwayne Johnson. Hart, 44, took the blows in a room where the jokes landed in real time and the crowd heard the kind of unscripted crossfire that has made roasts a recurring test of how far celebrity can be stretched before it snaps.
That matters because Netflix is now carrying a tradition that began in 1950, when the Friars Club started roasting notable members of its showbiz fraternity, and stretched onto television in 1973 when Dean Martin began doing Friars-style segments on his weekly variety show. After the 2003 roast of Denis Leary, led by Jeff Garlin, Comedy Central leaned harder into the form; that show became the most-watched in the network’s history. But the channel later got out of the roast business in 2019, after a roast hosted by Sean Hayes that targeted Alec Baldwin.
Netflix stepped into that gap in 2021 with The Jonas Brothers Family Roast, then went bigger in 2024 with The Roast of Tom Brady, hosted by Hart and later nominated for an Emmy. That Brady special mostly revolved around jokes about Brady neglecting his family and about Gisele allegedly cheating on him with her jiu-jitsu instructor, a reminder that the modern roast still depends on one thing above all: a celebrity willing to sit still while everyone else goes for the most painful line in the room.
The Kevin Hart event also arrived with a built-in scale that matched the format’s history. The Netflix Is a Joke Festival turned Los Angeles into an SXSW-style takeover of multiple venues, and the roast sat at the center of that spread. For viewers, the appeal was the same as ever — a famous target, a live crowd and enough comic risk to make the night feel unpredictable. For Netflix, it was proof that roasts are no longer a side project. They are part of the streamer’s comedy brand, and Katt Williams was one of the names that made this one land.
