Roasted Comedy Battle
Grove 34
31 – 83 34th St.
Queens, NY
Dec. 6, 2023
On Wednesday, all the way out in Queens, at the self-proclaimed eighth best comedy club in the city, 14 comedians gathered for the singular purpose of finding out who’s best at making everyone else feel like shit. Let this be content warning enough.
For the unaware, the roast is a time-honored tradition in the comedy world. In its purest form a roast is centered around one person, positioned as the man-of-dishonor. Comedians, roasters, take turns dishing the worst insults they can muster toward their unfortunate roastee. It’s all in good fun, an inversion of the best-man-speech. The contemporary roast battle is a further perversion of this formula, wherein comedians are paired off and pitted against each other in a tit-for-tat exchange of verbal abuse.
It’s all in good fun.
I was invited to the event by one of the judges, comedian John Ajodah — who, after witnessing this event, I can confidently say may be the meanest man in NYC. He was joined by three other comics: Dan Wickes, who runs the show; Scott Hall; and Sarah Barnitt. Their job for the evening was to select which of the two comics facing off came away victorious, always adding a jab of their own. They certainly had their work cut out for them.
A brief selection of insults hurled:
Excellent comeback from the Bratz Doll for Ugly Girls. — Andrew Muller
Andrew and his fiancé have sex as much as I like to imagine my parents do, and by that I mean: I hope it never happens. — Alia Rose
We’ve got to make this round quick. Elijah has to get back to calling a man guy for crying at his son’s funeral — Daniel J Perafan
Perhaps reading the bits doesn’t serve very well. The words themselves are simply mean, no matter how clever. But in a room full of friends, not an enemy one, we’re all allowed in on the ribbing.
The veneer only breaks when one of the battles is poorly matched. An intense bout of punching down isn’t nearly as fun to watch as two competitors that are equal in their ball-busting skills. Luckily, at Grove 34 on Wednesday, not only was everyone seemingly friends, but also operating with such respect toward their craft and the craft of their comrades that this was scarcely a problem. It’s all handshakes and hugs in the bloodbath:
Hey, it’s not my fault you’re the Michael Phelps of being misgendered, okay? — Maxim Allen-Lan
Maxim looks like what you’d find if you searched ‘Honky’ into Google Images — Chris Shurr
Dave, you cartoon mascot for a chalk-flavored candy bar, you look like what would happen if a human had sex with one of those thumb people from Spy Kids — Ish Gupta
The standout battle of the night was the finale: Yet another pairing of old friends, Claire Siemietkowski and Kevin Mulharin. The form was perverted even further: Claire, every turn holding fast and leveling well-crafted insults, but cut at the knees whenever Kevin’s turn came around, him continuing a simple line of increasingly pathetic inquiry, blaming Claire for ruining his last long-term relationship, asking, again and again: How do you live with yourself?
Ajodah broke down the outcome of the battle thusly: “You see, Claire — let me mansplain something to you real quick. It’s like rock, paper, scissors. Good jokes beat bad jokes. BUT! No jokes beats good jokes every time. Gotta come ready to play.”
Now, the comedians will no doubt hang me over the flames for waxing poetic about this event, but nevertheless, it must be said: There’s something beautiful about a roast battle.
In short, it’s a celebration of difference. One can only make fun of something about someone if they can be absolutely sure the same cannot be said about them. Because of this there’s a certain amount of over-reliance on looks-oriented takedowns, but to complain of this would be tantamount to complaining about rhymes at a poetry reading or power chords at a rock show. This simple operation, this direction toward difference, opens a chasm between the two individuals onstage, solidifying each person’s identity by way of the insults hurled by the other. In tearing each other to pieces, both comedians come out all the more whole.
And then something even more interesting happens! Once the shock of two people verbally brutalizing each other has waned, the skill becomes apparent. Though the surface content of a roast is mean, often tending toward outright bigotry, the codes of fair play and equal exchange stand to keep the exchanges above board. That’s not to say that it’s all safe, per se: Several of the judges, when asked what they wanted to see from the jokes in the battles to come, said, “I just want to see someone get their feelings hurt.”
Typed out, this seems cruel, but under it all is a firmer truth: The safety here lies in its unsafety. It’s the rule of this world that things will be cruel, that none of it is meant as anything other than funny. The holds that are barred open opportunities for what the comedian thought was within their boundaries to be made into a well-spring of their humiliation. And here’s where the final judgements lie: Who can craft best the jokes and insults that hit somewhere where they thought they were safe, whose pride can be most easily rendered shame, and who’s cruelty can be the most kind.
It’s all good fun. Let the flames fly.
