Roasting: A comedy tradition

Last night a bunch of Oklahoma City comics got together and roasted one of our own, Mr. Zac McClure.
Zac is moving to Los Angeles and in Oklahoma City comedy tradition we gave him a proper sending off. But roasting is a weird act, you want to be funny, you want to be accurate, and you want to say the meanest things you can, all while leaving the subject with the knowledge that you deeply care about them and are just giving them a little bit of hell in good fun.

Last night I realized a few things about roasts, mainly that they aren't audience friendly. I mean if the audience knows the subject and some of the participants it can be fun. I invited some people I knew to the roast, people unfamiliar with most OKC comics, and I can't imagine they had a good time. The a good roast, not a good televised roast, but a good intimate roast should look, to an outsider, as if a series of hilarious inside jokes are being performed, that you don't quite understand.

I learned a lot about roasting last night, I had the privilege of going later in the show, but that also meant that I had to have better and more original jokes than everyone who went before me, because hearing a joke twice in one night is pain, and there are only a finite number of things you can say to people that make sense.

Roasting, when done correctly, should leave everyone with a sense of respect and reverence for the subject. Going into my first roast I didn't think about this, I just thought about being mean and saying horrible things to people. I didn't know the girl getting roasted and it showed. The McClure roast on the other hand, sure things were said that in any other context would have led to violence, but at the end of the day the guy knows I love him and am going to miss him when he goes off to LA.

Stand out roasters
Brandon Patrick
Zach Smith
James Nghiem
Spencer Hicks
Jeramy Westbrook
Trey Baker
Nathan Joyner
and of course Zac McClure

Also, I didn't escape the roast unscathed! I got busted for my gigantic ego, and how whiney I come off in some of my blog posts. It's all love. Maybe?