Summary

• Comedy Central popularized celebrity roasts but has been quiet for years. Is the roast culture dead, or will Netflix bring it back?
• Comedy Central roasts featured dark humor, but some jokes were too much even for TV. Netflix now carries on the tradition with live roasts.
• Despite the end of Comedy Central roasts, Netflix has stepped up with the roast of Tom Brady in a similar format.

Roasts have given us some of the best moments in insult comedy. You take a well-known celebrity, often with a less-than-stellar public track record, and invite them to endure brutal verbal takedowns from their friends and other big names. It's everything that viewers love about celebrity culture. While Comedy Central didn't invent roasts, they certainly popularized the format for a mainstream audience. From 2003 to 2019, Comedy Central hosted 17 roasts brutally mocking Hollywood's shining stars. Some of the notorious roastees included Pamela Anderson, Joan Rivers, Charlie Sheen, Roseanne Barr, Justin Bieber, Alec Baldwin, and a certain Apprentice host turned future US president.

However, there has not been a new roast in nearly five years. Even more odd is that Comedy Central does not seem to have commented on their future. Are the roasts dead? Are they coming back? We really don't know. Whatever the case, other platforms are picking up where Comedy Central left off. In 2024, Netflix broadcast the live roast of Tom Brady, featuring a structure similar to that of the old Comedy Central shows. So, is Netflix the new future of our favorite insult comedy specials? Let's look at what we know.

Comedy Central Has a Roast-Worthy History

The New York Friars Club is widely credited with creating the celebrity roast at its exclusive dinners in the 1940s. While these early events were held behind closed doors, some of their roasts were broadcast on TV in the 1960s as part of NBC's variety show Kraft Music Hall. Dean Martin later adopted the style for his eponymous variety show in 1974.

Comedy Central began to broadcast the roasts put on by the Friars Club in 1998. Based on that success, they launched roasts back into the public eye with their in-house produced Comedy Central Roast in 2003. They would feature roughly one roast per year for the next 16 years. Comedy Central's specials followed a similar format to what came before. A rather infamous celebrity (the "roastee") would be invited to sit on stage and endure verbal jabs from a panel of their friends and other well-known comedians and stars. Each would take turns tearing the roastee and their fellow panelists apart before typically ending on a somewhat sincere note.

Since topics were rarely off limits at Comedy Central, audiences could see some truly dark and brutal topics laughed about. Everyone agreed it was all in good fun, and no one usually took what was said too seriously. Some jokes were cut from the television broadcasts after filming, like when Jeff Ross compared Seth Green to the perpetrator of the 2012 Colorado theater mass shooting at Roseanne Barr's roast. Another joke about the death of Paul Walker, a close friend of roaster Ludacris, was cut from Justin Bieber's special.

The End of a Roasting Era

Comedy Central's last roast was held in 2019, featuring Alec Baldwin as the guest of honor. Even though it's been nearly five years, Comedy Central has made no announcements on the future of their roasts. Taking 2020 and 2021 off was understandable, as bringing a dozen people together on stage in close proximity was not feasible during COVID-19. But what about since then?

With no official confirmations, people online have speculated why the roasts may be no more. Perhaps they took too long off during COVID-19 and left the public eye. Maybe it's a budgetary concern, as paying all these famous folks for their time cannot be cheap. The ratings for the roasts, as with everything else on TV, may have just gotten so low that they couldn't justify continuing.

It's a shame they're gone because they were a staple of Comedy Central's original programming. Today, the struggling network only has stalwarts South Park and The Daily Show, along with the new animated offering Digman! on their original slate. Comedy Central as a whole isn't what it used to be, and they may have had to let the roasts go as a casualty.

Netflix Has Taken Over With Celebrity Roasts

In Comedy Central's absence, others have stepped up to fill the roast-shaped hole in our popular culture. On May 5, 2024, Netflix broadcast the first of its kind live roast of Tom Brady. This roast followed a similar structure as Comedy Central's, even featuring roasters who appeared on CC, like Jeff Ross, Nikki Glaser, roastmaster Kevin Hart, and the greatest news anchor of all time, Ron Burgundy. Several other comics and former teammates of Brady took turns throwing their jabs at the Greatest of All Time. Surprise guests like Kim Kardashian and an awkward Ben Affleck dropped by to mixed results. While this was the first in Netflix's intended new series of roasts, it's not the first time the streaming behemoth took on the style.

In 2019, Ross executive produced and hosted Historical Roasts, a miniseries roasting famous historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They also held a roast of all three Jonas Brothers in 2021. Netflix has shown commitment to this beloved television tradition, and it's safe to say that they're the new home for roasts going forward.

We may never know why Comedy Central stepped away from one of its most iconic traditions, but given the channel's stagnation and five-year roast hiatus, we've likely seen the last of the Comedy Central Roast. But in this divided world, it's comforting to know that Netflix is now platforming one of the few traditions that most people still agree on. These larger-than-life celebrities may need to be brutally mocked and taken down a peg to remind them they're no better than us. Well, except for Tom Brady, he is much better than most of us. The Roast of Tom Brady is streaming now on Netflix.