Kevin Hart takes the hot seat on Sunday 10 May at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. Shane Gillis hosts. Netflix streams the whole thing live, globally, at 5pm Pacific. It is the closing night of Netflix Is a Joke Fest 2026, and the final beat in a stadium-scale week of stand-up.<\/p>\n
This is also the second tentpole live roast Netflix has produced in two years. The 2024 Tom Brady event drew 26 million views and an Emmy nomination. Hart was a roaster there. Now he is the target. The format has graduated from late-night curio to global Sunday-night event.<\/p>\n
The Brady roast worked because it was unrehearsable in a way most specials are not. Jokes landed or died on a live mic. Netflix comedy bosses Robbie Praw and Tracey Pakosta have spent two years trying to repeat that trick without diluting it. In a recent interview with Variety<\/a>, Praw set the bar:<\/p>\n “There has never been a comedian at Kevin’s level that has been in that hot seat.”<\/p>\n Robbie Praw, Netflix vice-president of stand-up and comedy formats, speaking to Variety<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is not just hype. Roasting a fellow roastmaster shifts the difficulty. Hart roasted Justin Bieber for Comedy Central in 2015 and was himself filleted at the 2024 Mark Twain Prize ceremony. Booked roasters cannot lean on stale jabs about height or family-friendly films. They have to write fresh.<\/p>\n The economic story for working comics sits backstage, not on the dais. Each named roaster on a Netflix live event runs a small writers’ room of two to six joke writers. There is also a punch-up pass from the executive producer team. Jeff Ross sits on Hart’s executive producer credit alongside Casey Patterson, Amy Zvi and Dave Becky. That production stack hires.<\/p>\n Pay scales have moved. Punch-up writers on the Brady event were paid four-figure day rates, with bonuses for jokes that made the air. Same-day rewrite stamina matters more than a glossy reel. If you are a club comic with a reputation for tight one-liners, your phone is now a tool for booking work. That work did not exist three years ago. The skill is closer to a roast battle than a 45-minute hour. It rewards the craft we wrote about in our piece on Ashley Padilla and comic timing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Live broadcast events sit on top of a city’s club ecosystem, not next to it. The week leading up to Sunday’s show has filled rooms across Los Angeles, from the Comedy Store to Largo. Roasters are running material in front of small audiences before the cameras roll. Bookers who can offer a quiet midweek slot at short notice are now part of the supply chain.<\/p>\n Compare that to the loss of Balham’s Banana Cabaret<\/a> in London, where four decades of work-in nights vanished when the lease ended. Live televised roasts will not save indie venues on their own. But they create demand for exactly the kind of room a chain club struggles to provide. UK promoters watching the Hart event should review their warm-up calendars. They need to be flexible enough to host visiting roasters from the United States during festival weeks.<\/p>\n Live is not a magic word. The first Netflix live event, Chris Rock’s 2023 special, had visible technical wobbles. The Brady roast went long and lost its rhythm in the third act. The next live roast can fail in public, and a comic who freezes on a global stream takes a real career hit. Producers know this, which is why Pakosta told Deadline<\/a> the booking process is conservative:<\/p>\n The instinct to invite a list of safe, established names rather than rising acts is rational television, but it caps the discovery upside. That tension is the same one driving competition shows like the new Funny AF with Kevin Hart<\/a>, where Ron Taylor took the title last week. The ladder for a working comic now runs through both: a competition slot to get noticed, and a roast writers’ room to get paid.<\/p>\n The headline reading is that live roasts are big TV. The contrarian reading is that they are big infrastructure. Netflix has now built a recurring live-comedy production muscle that did not exist in 2022. Cameras, satellite trucks, joke-clearance lawyers, dais carpentry, the lot. That capacity will be reused, and not always for roasts. Expect a live awards parody, a live competition final, and at least one live election-night comedy event before 2027.<\/p>\n For the working comic, the practical move is unromantic. Write ten roast-style punchlines on a public figure every week. Keep them in a notes file. Show them to anyone you know who has touched a live event. Producers do not hire from cold submissions; they hire from the comic their head writer played a club with last month. Career compounding is local, even when the broadcast is global. That is the same lesson we drew from our open-mic-to-headliner career path piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n The risk to watch is consolidation. If two streamers control the live comedy event format, the bargaining position of mid-tier comedians narrows. A healthy live roast economy needs a second buyer. Whether HBO, Amazon or a UK broadcaster steps in over the next 12 months will tell us how durable Sunday’s moment really is.<\/p>\n Sunday 10 May 2026, 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern, 1am UK on Monday 11 May), live on Netflix from the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Shane Gillis hosts. Hart, Casey Patterson, Jeff Ross, Amy Zvi and Dave Becky executive produce. The full roaster lineup had not been announced as of 7 May.<\/p>\n The 2024 Tom Brady roast pulled 26 million views and an Emmy nomination. Streamers want event television that cannot be spoiled, and a live roast meets that brief at lower cost than scripted live drama.<\/p>\n Through relationships with the named roasters and the executive producer team. Punch-up rooms are small, hire by referral and pay day rates rather than residuals. A track record at roast battles and a fast turnaround portfolio are the cheapest credentials to build.<\/p>\n Indirect upside. Visiting roasters work out material in clubs in the days before a broadcast. UK promoters with flexible midweek slots can host warm-up sets when festival traffic flows through London, Edinburgh or Manchester.<\/p>\n\n
Inside the writers’ rooms<\/h2>\n
What this means for venues and bookers<\/h2>\n
The risk: live TV punishes weak material<\/h2>\n
Stage Book’s take<\/h2>\n
FAQ<\/h2>\n
When and where is the Roast of Kevin Hart?<\/h3>\n
Who is hosting?<\/h3>\n
Why is the live roast format growing now?<\/h3>\n
How do working comics get into a roast writers’ room?<\/h3>\n
What does this mean for UK venues?<\/h3>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
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