I'm a huge fan of roasts. I love the old Friars Club Roasts from back in the day (well before I was born). They have some of the true legends of comedy really laying it down on each other. Over the last many (over 10) years, Comedy Central has taken the torch and has been holding roasts of their own. Some of these have been outstanding, and there have been a couple of weak ones as well.
I'm going to come right out and say that this one will probably go down as one of the weaker roasts, at least with me it will for sure. There were some excellent moments and some great jokes, but there were also a lot of very redundant jokes, including one of the first ones of the night told by the Roastmaster, Seth Rogan.
I'll start with who Franco is though. I don't think I need to go too much into detail, as most people know enough about him. He really broke out on the show Freaks and Geeks in the late 90's. Since then he's been in many movies, usually with his crew of guys like Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson. It's sort of a crew that they have where they do movies, usually heavy in pot humor. He's also written, directed, and produced, and is even an author.
So anyway, the show started with Seth Rogan giving the introduction, and of course right away there come the pot jokes, pretty much the only thing he seems to know how to do. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Rogan, and have found him funny before, but his pot jokes are overdone and completely uninspired while having nothing creative about them. Right away it looked like this was going to be a bunch of bad stoner jokes.
Things took a while to pick up. Jonah Hill had a couple of good jokes, especially one where he took a shot at Franco when he tried to host the Oscars. However, pretty much every roaster after would have at least one of their own, and none of them were nearly as good. Hill's jokes were not his weakness, it was more the fact that he had to assure everyone that he liked them after every joke. Sure, maybe if he was doing it to be funny, it was funny after the first or second time, but it was after what seemed like almost every joke.
Nick Kroll also had a good joke or two, but overall totally failed to impress. He just never did anything that really had me even entertained, and I love his show. There was a lot of jokes about Franco and others there being Jewish, but Kroll was far from the only one up there to do Jew jokes, and none of the ones told were original or funny.
There was some goo performances though. Sarah Silverman was the first person to go up who really had me laughing. She's a veteran of roasts, and she showed it. Natasha Leggero was very funny. Aziz Ansari was funny for the most part, but was too logical for me to laugh too hard. He came up bitter at all of the Indian jokes, but then again, they're annoying for me, so they're probably even worse for him.
Andy Samburg and Bill Hader were two Saturday Night Alums who did a very good job. Samburg went with the Neil Hamburger or Norm McDonald anti-comedy type of performance. He did a great job at it. He did it in a route that was fairly unique and was very funny. Bill Hader came out as the President of Hollywood, a character he played that was a persona sort of like a 60-70 year old Hollywood elitist. It was very funny, and he even ripped into himself while doing it.
Jeff Ross was as funny as would be expected. I wouldn't say that it was up to par with his last few, but it still stood out among the other roasters, who were largely funny, but still nothing like guys like Anthony Jeselnik or Amy Schumer. James Franco, as the roastee, got the last word in. It was very weak. He just didn't have anything behind him. There were a couple of funny moments, but as a whole it just wasn't anything that I cared for.
The roast had its funny moments, and for a while was actually quite good. However, it's still in the lower half of the roasts that Comedy Central has had since they started doing them in 2003 (before that, going back to 1998, they produced the Friars Club Roasts). It wasn't as bad as Larry the Cable guy, but it was still a pretty weak roast. Still though, it was probably better than anything else that was on.
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