There was a time when celebrity roasts were built on the tiniest shred of wit, driven not by a desire to be as offensive as possible but to poke fun at uncomfortable truths packaged in genuine humor and delivered with enough intelligence to make even the roastee laugh. But today’s generation of roasts — now hosted by Netflix for ungodly amounts of money — are about as far from comedy as they could possibly be.

No, they’re just algorithmic outrage factories, populated by attention whores.

The latest example of this pattern was Netflix’s roast of Kevin Hart, who is clearly willing to do quite literally anything for a paycheck. To be fair, at least this roast wasn’t the most humiliating on-screen performance of Hart’s career.

But the problem wasn’t Hart himself, or his insistence on making every joke about him, whether by pulling his trademark and well-rehearsed shocked face, adding real-time commentary, or his favorite, standing-up-and-walking-around-the-stage-bent-over-laughing.

No, the real problem here is the entire vapid format.

Modern celebrity roasts are little more than gatherings of wealthy, disconnected entertainers trying to outdo each other with the most deliberately inflammatory line possible. Not the funniest line, and not the smartest line, but the line most likely to send social media platforms into a frenzy.

Take Shane Gillis casually combining the Israel-Hamas conflict with abortion politics by calling Chelsea Handler a “Zionist” and joking about “dead babies,” or Pete Davidson mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk while tossing in crude sexual insults aimed at perhaps the least funny person on the stage (and that’s saying something), Tony Hinchcliffe.

None of this is ever clever or insightful or original. But that’s never the goal. The goal is to engineer provocation, because the entire business model of these squalid performances has changed. These people no longer care whether audiences genuinely laugh, but whether clips trend on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube. And when attention is the only currency that matters now, and outrage is the fastest and easiest way to generate it, why bother being funny?

With a single sentence, Gillis managed to bait pro-Israel activists, anti-Israel activists, pro-life conservatives and abortion activists simultaneously, and don’t pretend for a second that Davidson didn’t know exactly what he was doing by combining Charlie Kirk’s murder with allegations of gay oral sex.

All “jokes” manufactured for social media, targeting Americans who keep taking the bait.

Speaking to my own “side,” every time conservatives rage-post about some celebrity making an intentionally disgusting joke, all they are doing is participating in a marketing campaign. They’re not fighting back, but guaranteeing that millions more see the content in the first place.

Saying shocking things is not courageous, and drunk celebrities insulting each other in front of a handpicked Hollywood crowd is not edgy rebellion. It’s just a bunch of content creators chasing clicks in their own version of OnlyFans, where gay jokes have replaced naked women.

Next time — and unfortunately, there will keep being a next time — please remember: You do not have to participate in the outrage cycle. You do not have to amplify every desperate celebrity screaming for attention, and you certainly do not have to pretend that juvenile vulgarity is somehow the pinnacle of modern comedy.

Sometimes the most effective response to petulant children is simply ignoring the tantrum. Or, at the very least, not handing them an ice cream every time they shout “boobs!” in class.

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