Steve Harvey
Steve Harvey is an actor, born 1957.
Steve Harvey came out of stand-up and has spent the years since converting a comedy act into an entire broadcasting operation: a morning radio show, a syndicated daytime hour, a game show franchise, an arbitration comedy in a courtroom set, and a shelf of advice books. Born in Welch, West Virginia in 1957, he took his own name into scripted television first, playing Steve Hightower on The Steve Harvey Show, a sitcom about a musician teaching high school that is still the best showcase of his timing.
Family Feud is where he became inescapable. What he added to a format that had run for decades without him was reaction: he stopped playing the host and started playing the audience, holding a silence after a bad answer until the contestant hears it back. That instinct, the pause rather than the punchline, is the whole act, and it transfers to radio, to a game show stage and to a courtroom set without adjustment. Seven Daytime Emmys, two Marconi Awards and fourteen NAACP Image Awards suggest the industry agrees.
The film work is a sideline: comedies from the early 2000s, a voice part in a talking-animal picture, a run of self-appearances. The books did better. His relationship advice turned into a hardback and then into a hit ensemble comedy, which is a rarer trick than the acting career itself, and it is why his name sits on this page across three different media.
Movies (9)
TV (9)
Books (2)
Where to start with Steve Harvey
One episode of Family Feud is the whole argument for him. If you want the extended version, Celebrity Family Feud gives him famous people to be exasperated by, which visibly raises his game.
The Steve Harvey Show is the scripted work worth your time, and it dates well because the jokes are performed rather than written at you. On the film side, The Fighting Temptations and Johnson Family Vacation are the pleasant ones, while Think Like a Man is the ensemble comedy built out of his own book, Act like a lady, think like a man, which is the cross-media curiosity here. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee catches him unscripted and off duty, and it is the most revealing thing on the list.