Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. Artie Lange was scheduled but did not show at the roast because he had entered a rehabilitation center. Bill Engvall made a pre-taped appearance. Donald Trump and Don Rickles made a pre-taped appearance and Melissa Rivers came from the audience to roast her mother. Other audience members included Michael C. Seth MacFarlane was the roast master and was his first appearance on the show.
Giraldo died on September 29, The roast consisted of jokes toward Trump's hairstyle, his show The Apprentice, and his family. Jokes were also made about Jeselnik's fame or lack thereof , Matlin's deafness, King's age, and Jersey Shore. Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino was highly criticized for his performance; as a result, Comedy Central pulled several of his jokes from the television airing of the roast.
It also featured one of the most brutal roasters of all time, Gilbert Gottfried. The second inaugural roast was of comedian Jeff Foxworthy. While this roast featured some of the mainstay roasters, such as Gilbert Gottfried and Lisa Lampanelli, it was mostly an odd mixture of stars. However, the following year, which featured the roast of Pamela Anderson, was a lot more successful.
It was also the introduction of Roastmaster General, Jeff Ross. The Pamela Anderson roast, as well as the following William Shatner roast also allowed Comedy Central the chance to figure out how far they could push things. After all, the censors were going crazy over some of the jokes and even the talent believed the jokes were too offensive. And anyone who knows anything about the comedic stylings of Bob Saget knows that he is absolutely filthy. And this inspired those roasting him to push things further than ever before.
Especially the young people. But the roasting that night was on fire! Loose men are teased as sexual conquerors while loose women are mocked as whores or sluts. This stuff wasn't very funny when it was delivered with winking innuendo by Dean Martin, and it's no funnier in the unabashed manner of the current "Roastmaster General," Jeff Ross, who, at the Rob Lowe roast, appeared dressed as Prince, in what he seemed to consider a tribute to the late musician.
The principal jokes directed at Lowe were based on the fact that he had, in , recorded a sex tape with a young woman who was only sixteen years old, and that, in subsequent years, he had been mired in lawsuits with former nannies employed by his family, who accused him, among other things, of sexual harassment.
Lowe, who clearly viewed this evening as a certain kind of showbiz honor, gamely laughed along at the reminiscences of these unfunny things. He looked consistently delighted, showing off his thousand-dollar haircut and bazillion-dollar smile, while the show's host, David Spade, who made his name on "Saturday Night Live," in the nineties, by caustically mocking celebrities, looked rightly pained by the entire affair. There have been a few sparks of genius at the Comedy Central roasts over the years, such as Norm Macdonald's deadpan recitation of antiquated joke-book one-liners during the Bob Saget roast, in , or Bill Hader, at the roast of James Franco, in , playing a character called the President of Hollywood , who was a hyper-obscene version of the superproducer Robert Evans.
But both of these performances stood out because they ridiculed the genre itself. By comparison, the roasters who play it straight, escalating into further flights of brutishness, end up sounding like hacks doing bad Aristocrats routines.
Yet the real problem with these roasts is not that they have crossed some final line of propriety, or even that they are mostly humorless. The crime is how brazenly they reveal themselves to be pseudo-events, contrived for the very purpose of seeming newsworthy and thus being widely shared. For Comedy Central, these roasts produce exactly the viral readymades that television networks are so eager to wring out of their shows—disseminated in the form of YouTube clips and curated by Web sites as, in this case, the eleven most shocking things that comedians said about Ann Coulter.
There is something dismal about watching comedians read insults off of a teleprompter. And there is something very dismal about knowing how the sausage at these events gets made —that the performers occasionally flub their lines and have to reshoot the jokes for a second or third time, to what, we must assume, is ever depreciating laughter from the audience.
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