A documentary by Leslie Small and Tim Story. Rated 14A.

According to Kevin Hart and a lot of comics who get their own cable specials, “bitches” are: women who talk back or question your motives; whores and/or women who enjoy sex; women who don’t want sex with you; women who compete with those who do; your male friends, when they need to be taken down a peg; men who don’t act manly enough (i.e., who don’t call women “bitches”); and all women (plus anyone not mentioned above).

Now, maybe I would have enjoyed Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain if I were the kind of person who is tickled by hearing the B word, the N word, and, obviously, the F word hundreds of times in a 75-minute period (including credits). For some reason, though, numbing repetition doesn’t win me over.

The diminutive (5-2) standup, who has built a following well beyond his African-American audience—and made good impressions with supporting parts in films like the Scary Movie series and This Is the End—has potential as an actor. His intense physicality, coupled with sometimes masterful use of rhetorical expressions, could really be riveting if there were even the slightest depth to his material.

Admittedly, some charge comes from watching him riff on how far he’ll go to lie about being five minutes late. (It involves imaginary zoo animals.) But his jokes are usually laboured well past the point of being funny. And in a 45-minute package filmed during two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, he allows neither air nor nuance to stem the flow of his high-decibel hectoring—most of it courtesy of hired writers.

Making it all much, much worse is a poorly assembled 20-minute preface in which the grievance-ridden Hart—who produced this self-serving disaster—lays out how famous he is and why he still has so much splainin’ to do.

Talk about your pointless bitching.