Ethics

Roasts and the First Amendment

By Ed Brayton

Greg Beato has a terrific post at Reason online about the long tradition of Friar's Club roasts and how they helped push the boundaries of the First Amendment out a bit further. I've made no secret of the fact that I am a huge fan of that tradition. And I like this opening riff:

On Sunday night, eight of the most medium-sized names in showbiz convened in Studio City, California to roast Joan Rivers and her anatomically approximate face sculpture. When the event airs on Comedy Central on August 9th, and the insults commence, you may forget there was a time in American history when it was not considered appropriate to crack jokes about a 76-year-old grandmother's toxic vagina. Lucky for us, that time is long gone, and for this, we owe a debt of gratitude to Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and all the other mid-century yuk-meisters who practiced the art of speaking the unspeakable at Friars Club roasts years before Lenny Bruce got busted for subjecting audiences to obscene grammar lessons or George Carlin compiled his list of seven words you can never say on television.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on July 31, 2009 (boomark / email).