Roast Culture Quotes

Back when Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin were doing roasts, they were all friends. They knew each other's children, each other's wives, each other's families. It wasn't about being disrespectful. It was about being funny.

It really is great. Especially having people who we make fun every week come on and poke fun at themselves is really cool, I love that. No reality star has been mad at me yet for making fun of them. I'm sure that one day soon though, someone is going to take a swing at me.

As soon as a roast is announced, I get everybody - family, friends, waitresses, cab drivers - giving me jokes about the person getting roasted. I'm the mouthpiece for the masses.

I'm not a big fan of comedy roasts because most of the time I find them to be really mean, but once in a while, you'll hear something perfectly worded and well-crafted.

I hate being mean. I watch those roasts on Comedy Central and they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I have a theory, which is that the idea of a roast is to go to this forbidden, uncomfortable, almost performance-art-level shock place, but because we're so regularly shocked and offended today, the idea of an hour and a half of unbridled negativity is just so unappealing.

Someone who didn't do comedy might think it was awful to have someone talking about you. But I just love the attention, even if I'm not there.

Whatever the joke is has to be funny, and not coming from a mean-spirited place. I think some things are totally off limits. If someone's spouse died, or one of their children, I would never joke about that in a Roast situation. I don't have any aspirations towards writing any cancer jokes, and there's some stuff that I think is definitely taboo.

You know, sometimes I worry, you know, is comedy and my type of comedy going to get stale? Is it going to be so offensive that it becomes uninteresting or so niche that I don't have an audience anymore? But it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, where roasting now is a movement. These roasts are on in India, in Mexico.

I guess I like people doing roasts in public. That's my thing.