The Roast Is Back. What Does It Say That We're Most Comfortable with Cruelty Dressed as Celebration?

There is a genre of event in American entertainment built entirely around the premise of saying the things you are never supposed to say. Not in polite company, not in mixed company, not on camera, not ever — and certainly not to someone's face while they sit, smiling, in a throne-like chair at the front of a banquet room. The celebrity roast has survived vaudeville, broadcast television, cable, and the streaming wars. It has outlasted every other form of variety entertainment from its era. And in the past two years, it has returned not as nostalgia but as a genuine cultural event, commanding live audiences, Emmy nominations, and career-launching performances.

When Netflix aired The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady in May 2024, more than two million people tuned in on the debut night alone. The three-hour live special eventually accumulated 2.5 billion viewing minutes on the platform and spent three weeks on the Netflix Global Top 10. It was nominated for an Emmy. Jeff Ross, the comedian who has spent decades as the form's de facto steward, said that roasts had once been considered "a second-class citizen of TV" and that suddenly they were "nominated for an Emmy next to the Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys, and the Super Bowl Halftime Show." The format, he said, had become "a cultural moment."

The more revealing question is why.

From the Friars Club to the Forum

The roast did not begin on television. It began, like most things in American comedy, in a room in New York City where people in the entertainment industry were trying to impress each other. The New York Friars Club, which started in 1904 as an association for Broadway theatrical agents, had been holding what it called annual toasts for its notable members since at least 1908. By 1949, those toasts had calcified into something more pointed: a formalized roast, with French singer Maurice Chevalier as the first guest of honor. The format was simple. You sat at the front of the room. Your friends took turns insulting you. You thanked them at the end.

The events were private by design. They happened in a room full of people who understood the rules — insiders honoring insiders through the ritualistically hostile vocabulary of the comedy world. Dean Martin brought the format to NBC in the early 1970s, airing it as a series of specials that ran until 1984 and introduced the concept to American living rooms, though in a defanged form that traded the Friars Club's genuine edge for the milder warmth of variety television. Comedy Central revived the tradition in 1998, first by broadcasting the Friars Club events themselves and then, by 2003, by producing its own roasts with increasingly explicit language and harder edges — skewering figures like Pamela Anderson, Donald Trump, and Justin Bieber.

Then the roasts went quiet. Comedy Central wound the format down. The cultural moment appeared to have passed. And then, after what one publication called "nearly five years since the last roast aired," Netflix broke the silence with Brady.

What changed was not the format. It was almost identical to what it had always been: a dais of comedians and celebrities, a guest of honor in the hot seat, a series of escalating insults framed as tributes. What changed was the context — and the country.

What Consent Has to Do with It

The contemporary roast operates on a logic that its predecessors took for granted but rarely articulated: consent. The guest of honor agrees to be there. They have signed something. They have, in many cases, helped produce the event. Tom Brady was not ambushed. He was an executive producer of his own roasting.

This matters more than it might seem, because the consent frame is precisely what allows the cruelty to masquerade as celebration. Brady's presence transforms what would otherwise be a public humiliation into a performance of resilience. The audience does not feel guilty laughing at him because he has, in effect, pre-authorized the laughter. He is demonstrating, by sitting in that chair, that he can take it. The roast becomes a test of character dressed as comedy.

Psychologists Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson, in an influential 2008 study on what they called disparagement humor, found that hostile jokes provide audience members with a feeling of superiority — a concept that stretches back to Aristotle, who argued that comedy portrays a worse version of our true selves while tragedy depicts a better one. The roast engages this mechanism with unusual directness. We are watching someone absorb insults we could never absorb with the grace they are expected to display. Their composure becomes a kind of spectacle in itself.

But there is a complication. Psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren propose what they call Benign Violation Theory — the idea that something becomes funny when it violates a social norm while remaining, in some important sense, safe. A joke about a celebrity's failed marriage works because the violation (saying the unspeakable) is offset by the safety of the format (everyone agreed to this; no one is really being harmed). The problem is that the line between benign and not is subjective, contextual, and constantly shifting. And the roast has always tested that line. When it works, audiences experience the frisson of transgression within a container. When it does not — when the joke lands wrong, when someone goes too far — the container cracks, and the cruelty underneath is suddenly visible.

The Star That Got Made

The Brady roast produced something unexpected: a genuine career transformation. Nikki Glaser, who had spent more than a decade working the comedy circuit — appearing on Comedy Central roasts, releasing HBO specials, hosting podcasts — delivered a nine-minute set at the Brady dais that was immediately described as one of the best in the history of the format. Within months, she had been named the host of the Golden Globes, becoming the first woman to host that ceremony solo. She was then asked back for a second year in 2026, and confirmed for a third in 2027. A bidding war broke out for her next stand-up special, which went to Hulu.

The roast made her. Not her specials. Not her decade of circuit work. The roast.

There is something worth sitting with in that trajectory. The specific comedy form that demands the most cruelty from its participants — that rewards the most merciless joke, the most precise strike at someone's most public wound — turned out to be the most efficient career accelerant available. Glaser did not go viral for warmth or for a clever bit of wordplay. She went viral for landing a joke about Brady walking away from his pregnant girlfriend. The precision of the cruelty was the point. The line about Brady's former partner, actress Bridget Moynahan — timed exactly, delivered with a smirkingly abashed quality that made the devastation feel almost affectionate — was the moment people replayed and shared and quoted.

This is the roast's particular economy: the worst thing you can say, said perfectly, at exactly the right moment, is also the most valuable thing.

The Audience and Its Permission

The roast's revival did not happen in a vacuum. It arrived at a specific cultural moment — one in which irony had become so pervasive that sincerity was suspect, in which the internet had normalized the public evisceration of public figures, and in which cancel culture had made certain comics feel surveilled and constrained in ways they found professionally stifling. The roast offered something rare: a forum with explicit permission. The target had signed off. The cruelty was consensual. The audience could laugh without guilt because everyone understood the rules.

But the permission structure also does something else. It reveals, by contrast, how much of our normal entertainment already functions as a roast without calling itself one. The comment section beneath a celebrity's Instagram post is a roast without a dais. The reaction video genre is a roast without formal acknowledgment. The tabloid culture that has surrounded fame for a century is a roast without consent. The live roast, with its explicit consent and formal structure, is in some ways the most honest version of something the culture has always been doing. At least here, everyone knows what they signed up for.

Ford and Ferguson's research on disparagement humor also found something that complicates the simple pleasures of the roast: hostile jokes do not necessarily make prejudiced people more prejudiced, but they do shift the social norms around acceptable expression. They create, as the researchers put it, a social environment more tolerant of prejudiced forms of expression. The joke does not change the individual; it changes the room. The roast happens in a highly visible room. Millions of people are watching.

The Structure of a Good Roast Joke

What distinguishes a great roast joke from a merely cruel one is craft. A roast joke that works is not simply an insult — it is an insult that reveals something true. The target's public persona must be present in the joke for the joke to land. When a lesser roaster at the Brady event threw a generic jab about his divorce, it got a polite laugh. When Glaser connected Brady's retirement pattern to his personal one, the joke worked because it tied the public man to the private failure in a way that felt earned. The humor came from recognition, not just from pain.

This is the craft that separates roast comedy from bullying: the best roast jokes are sociological. They say something about the culture that produced the celebrity, not just about the celebrity's personal failings. A joke about a quarterback's ego is a joke about how we build quarterbacks. A joke about a celebrity's brand deals is a joke about what fame has become. The roast, at its best, is a form of cultural criticism wearing insults as a costume.

Jeff Ross has described the roast as a form that requires its subject to be significant enough to be worth skewering. "There are a lot of B-list celebrities who want to get roasted," he said after the Brady event. "I want it to feel like the Olympics." What he means, though he may not say it quite this way, is that a roast only works if the target has accumulated enough cultural meaning to be worth dissecting. The cruelty only functions as celebration if there is something real to celebrate underneath it.

What We Are Really Watching

There is a generosity buried in the roast that does not always get acknowledged. By surviving it — by sitting in the chair, absorbing the blows, and emerging still standing — the subject of a roast demonstrates something the audience genuinely values: the ability to hold power loosely. Brady spent three hours being told that his career was fraudulent, his marriage collapsed, and his legacy contested. He kept smiling. Whatever one thinks of Brady the athlete or the person, the grace of that performance communicates something real: here is someone who has achieved enough, and knows it enough, that they do not need you to be gentle with them.

The roast is popular again because that quality — the graceful absorption of punishment — is in short supply. Public life has become a landscape of fragile egos and carefully managed images, of brand teams and publicists and pre-approved narratives. The roast forces a celebrity to stand unprotected in front of a room that has their files. It produces, at its best, a rare and strangely compelling spectacle: a person who chose to be there, who could have said no, and who is choosing to laugh.

That we find it entertaining says something about how starved we are for authenticity, even when that authenticity arrives dressed as cruelty. That the most cutting jokes earn the biggest laughs says something about our discomfort with the carefully curated version of fame we are usually served. And that a comedian's career can be transformed by a perfectly aimed line about a quarterback's pregnant girlfriend says something about what, underneath all the structure and consent and production value, the roast has always been: permission, for one night, to say what everyone is already thinking.

We have not changed that much. We are still a culture that loves a good roasting. We have just gotten more comfortable admitting it.