A friend recently shared a comment someone had made about her online. Sophie was a middle-aged, never-was influencer, in this stranger’s estimation, who exploited her children and alienated everyone she met. As I debated whether “liking” the post would read as support or broad agreement, I noticed a strange watermark. The vicious words had been generated not by a bitter stranger, but an AI roast app. My demented friend had asked for this.
Who would volunteer to be insulted? A wave of apps such as Roastai.app, Roastedby.ai, Roastik.com and er, Monica.im suggest the answer is loads of us. Every day, people upload selfies to the Reddit page r/RoastMe, begging to be taken down a peg or two hundred. “You look like a series of circles stacked on top of one another,” the users exult. “Why does your forehead start at the back of your head?” There is a cruel craft to it. One sedentary rapper recently got called “The Notorious BMI”, while someone else, who I don’t even think had strabismus, was accused of having “mortgage eyes – one fixed, one variable.”
At its harder end, roasting is full of brutal, hard to defend stuff. It takes us straight into the debate around comedy and offence, a frontline of the culture war. What are we allowed to joke about? What are the rules? How do we know we are not laughing the charred laughter of hate? The fact is some people will always want to play with the really hot stuff, the radioactive topics, the language that burns. “People love being roasted,” confirmed Sophie (terrible mother). But why?
In her memoir A Widow’s Story, Joyce Carol Oates reveals a surprising aspect of her grief: she misses the feeling of being teased. Impertinence can be a sign of intimacy. The same psychology underpins roasting. A play on “toasting”, the term was coined at a New York member’s club in the 40s, and popularised by Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts with his Rat Pack pals. To be roasted is to be truly seen – and celebrated anyway.
The question remains: why roast ourselves? Perhaps to get ahead of the joke. I think about Rebel Wilson’s character in Pitch Perfect. “I call myself Fat Amy so twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back” is a perfect line. But can we always de-fang the snake? And should we? I admit I find some of Sammy Davis Jr’s self-loathing comic “bits” hard to listen to. The most multi-talented member of the Rat Pack, it was only because of Sinatra’s intercession that Davis was allowed to stay in the hotels they played. Owning our pain doesn’t necessarily transform it.
Being roasted in the group chat is now a treasured pastime among my friends. I wonder if Britain has adopted the Americanism because our own word “banter” had grown too toxic? Too readily wheeled out as a defence by boors, who confuse being loud with being funny? A shame, as banter simply means repartee. (No one calls it that, because nobody wants to sound like a Musketeer.)
Comedy is perverse and slippery, like the human spirit. I remember another friend, who served in Afghanistan during an actual war, telling me about her army call sign. She chose Pork Chop. As in “Hello Pork Chop, this is Bravo 21; message over.” After a while, the lads in her unit started calling her Cupcake instead. Horrifically sexist; yet I laughed out loud when she told me. Hold off the big red button, let me unpack this laughter of hate.
A laugh can rely on specificity of tone and the context of a relationship. Setting matters, plus my sense of her intentions. In this case, something about her defiance of gender norms and its flat ineffectiveness. Other relationships matter – whether her colleagues were roasting her to include, or exclude. There’s also a subtle energy feedback loop. My friend, who is certainly no cupcake, is telling me this because she’s anticipating I’ll find it funny, which makes her find it funny, too.
Comedy – even the blunt stuff – is sophisticated. Unfortunately, the internet is superb at stripping away context and nuance. It’s heartbreaking that humour has fallen into the hands of those least qualified to handle it. On one side, people who need everything to be an argument, and on the other, bigots. Neither of these are my people and I refuse to pick a team.
Is comedy moral? No, it’s more important than that. Humour is both deeply subjective as well as a social safety valve against dogmatic thinking. Putting rules around what’s funny is as useless as trying to explain charm with a protractor and set square. But just because anything can be funny, doesn’t mean everything is funny.
Needless to say, I instantly downloaded a roast app and aimed it at myself. Do me! It came back with some crap gags making weak fun of the fact I don’t post frequently on X or Instagram, where it harvests its data. Too boring to print. AI is bad at roasting not because it’s evil, or offensive, but because it’s unfunny. AI is incapable of relationship, or meaningful celebration. It could have called me a skinny-fat race traitor with Peter Pan syndrome, but it just doesn’t know me like that.
Anyway, they say you shouldn’t dissect comedy, so instead I’m off to call social services on Sophie. Now that’s what I call banter!
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