Steve Harvey Tells Fans to Blame ‘Cancel Culture,’ Not ‘Family Feud,’ for Making Him Quit Comedy
by Keegan Kelly · Cracked.comHarvey insists that the sweetest gig in daytime TV had nothing to do with the woke mob ending his stand-up career
September 18, 2025
Steve Harvey says that the real reason why he quit performing stand-up comedy in 2012 was because audiences were becoming too sensitive and he didn’t want to self-censor just to appease them. Thankfully, the fans of Family Feud will never cancel him for staring into space whenever he hears the phrase “private parts.”
To the younger generation of TV-watchers, the name “Steve Harvey” is synonymous with the light, low-stakes humor of Family Feud, the game show for parents and children who burst their sides with laughter whenever they hear a euphemism for either a body part or a bodily function. Since 2010, Harvey has been the mustachioed master-of-ceremonies for the competition series that features the cleanest comedy on daytime television, and the former comedian has amassed a massive fortune that undoubtedly dwarfs whatever he earned as one of the four Kings of Comedy.
Consequently, Harvey has completely shed his former reputation as a brash, foul-mouthed stand-up comedy firecracker and assumed one of a beloved nursing home entertainer.
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In 2019, Forbes claimed that Harvey was raking in a whopping $45 million annually from his hosting duties on Family Feud and his radio show The Steve Harvey Morning Show, one year of which would be more than enough to convince any touring comedian to give up the road-dog lifestyle for good. However, during Harvey’s recent appearance on The Pivot Podcast, he claimed that the real reason why he retired from stand-up comedy almost immediately after taking the job at Family Feud was because he predicted that the comedy industry would soon be upturned by the nefarious “cancel culture.”
“I let stand-up go because I saw the change coming,” Harvey claimed, which makes a lot of sense — that much coin is hard to miss.
When Pivot Podcast host Channing Crowder asked Harvey to give his thoughts on “cancel culture,” Harvey replied plainly. “That’s why I left stand-up in 2012, 2015, one of them.”
Harvey's final stand-up special, Steve Harvey's Grand Finale, premiered in August 2012. Said Harvey of his decision to retire from live comedy, “I had so many shows, I had built such a catalog of work, and I was making money, and I had to let something go.”
“And if I tour on the weekends, I wouldn’t even have a family,” Harvey added of his former lifestyle — Harvey has seven children between three ex-wives. “So, I let stand-up go, because I saw the change coming.”
Harvey went so far as to say that, even in 2012, he knew that the hyper-sensitive phenomenon of “cancel culture” would soon become the most hot-button issue in comedy, despite the fact that the term wouldn’t enter common parlance until 2018. “You remember I said change is inevitable, you got to react or participate. So my participation was to get away from it because the cancel culture started becoming everywhere,” Harvey claimed.
“Comedy is too hard to do right now,” said the game show host who hasn’t done comedy in 13 years. “And all you gotta do is look at now, the way cancel culture works.”
Harvey couldn’t quite explain just how he thinks cancel culture operates, although he did go on to brag about the continued popularity of The Steve Harvey Morning Show and complain about FCC-imposed profanity rules that have been around since well before he stopped doing stand-up.
Clearly, the Family Feud host made the correct career move when he quit comedy to make tens of millions by tricking mothers from Middle America into saying the word “toilet.” But, at the same time, Harvey seems self-conscious about his motives in leaving behind the “comedian” label, and he’d rather blame the brief and now-entirely-concluded “cancel culture” era for his decision to switch jobs.
If Harvey ever decided to return to stand-up, I think that he would be pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s very easy for him to say anything he wanted onstage without repercussions — if he even has anything left to say.
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