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Steve Harvey Reveals Why He Quit Stand-Up Comedy

The “Family Feud” host admitted that he saw the writing on the wall.

One of the “Original Kings of Comedy” has named the culprit for the end of his stand-up career in 2012: cancel culture.

During an appearance on the Pivot podcast, Steve Harvey explained his decision to leave the stage more than a decade ago and focus on his TV shows by saying that “comedy’s too hard to do right now.”

“I saw the change coming,” Harvey said. “Change is inevitable. You got to react or participate. So my participation was to get away from it because the cancel culture started everywhere.”

“All you got to do is look now the way the cancel culture works,” the 68-year-old added.

In 2012, Harvey gave his last stand-up show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, a two-hour performance that aired live on pay-per-view TV.

“The road to this final show has been an amazing journey doing stand-up for the past 27 years, and I can’t thank fans enough,” Harvey said at the time.

Looking back at that choice, Harvey told Pivot that it was the right time to step away due to his personal success on TV and the changing dynamics of the comedy world.

“I left stand-up then because I had so many shows,” he said. “I had built such a catalog of work. I was making money. I had to let something go.”

Until that point, Harvey had balanced his live comedy career with his growing fame on screen.

The son of a coal miner, Harvey went from an insurance salesman and a mailman—even living out of his car for three years in the ’80s—to become an in-demand comic and variety show host.

His blockbuster run on the “Original Kings of Comedy” tour alongside D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and the late Bernie Mac, earned him widespread name recognition, helping The Steve Harvey Morning Show achieve quick success when it rolled out in 2000.

That weekday radio show is still nationally syndicated and one of the most popular radio programs on the air.

He also still hosts multiple Family Feud offshoots in addition to the flagship game show, plus the courtroom comedy show Judge Steve Harvey.

The podcast revelation isn’t the first time Harvey has bemoaned cancel culture.

During an episode of Judge Steve Harvey that aired in 2022, Harvey asked to take a picture of one of the show’s participants and said, “I got to have that picture, ‘cause you’re the stupidest dude I’ve ever met, and I don’t want to ever forget your face.”

That jab apparently led ABC executives to sit him down and tell him, “‘Steve, it’s not politically correct to call anybody stupid,’” in an episode he recounted to Jimmy Kimmel in 2022.

“Well OK, then what is he?” Harvey vented to the late-night host. “We were having a little struggle with the political correctness.”

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In 2017, Harvey received more flak for a joke he made denigrating Asian men and for telling a man from Flint, Michigan to “go have yourself a nice glass of brown water!”

He apologized for the first joke but not the second, saying that the target of the joke—a caller into his radio show—had laughed and that he had also helped raise awareness of the water crisis there.

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