TO Recently, a friend shared a comment someone had made about her online. Sophie was a middle-aged influencer who never was, in this stranger’s opinion, exploiting her children and alienating everyone she met. As I debated whether liking the post would be interpreted as support or broad agreement, I noticed a strange watermark. The mean words had not been generated by a bitter stranger, but by an AI app to mock others. My demented friend had asked for this.
Who would volunteer to be insulted? A wave of apps like Roastai App, Roasted by air, Roastik.com and uh, Monica.im I suggest the answer is that there are a lot of us. Every day, people upload selfies to the Reddit page. r/RoastMeasking to be moved down a notch or two hundred. “You look like a series of circles stacked on top of each other,” users exclaim. “Why does your forehead start at the back of your head?” There’s cruelty behind this. One sedentary rapper was recently dubbed “The BMI Celebrity,” while another person, who I don’t even think had strabismus, was accused of having “mortgaged eyes: one fixed, one variable.”
At its most hardcore, barbecue is full of brutal, hard-to-defend stuff. It brings us straight to the debate over comedy and offence, a front line in the culture war. What are we allowed to joke about? What are the rules? How do we know we’re not laughing with the charred laughter of hate? The fact is, some people will always want to play on the really hot stuff, the radioactive topics, the language that burns. “People love to be ridiculed,” Sophie (a terrible mother) confirmed. But why?
In his memoirs The story of a widowJoyce Carol Oates reveals a surprising aspect of her pain: she misses the feeling of being made fun of. Impertinence can be a sign of intimacy. The same psychology underpins ridicule. A pun on “toasting,” the term was coined in a New York members’ club in the 1940s and popularized by Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts with his Rat Pack friends. To be ridiculed is to be truly seen, and celebrated anyway.
The question remains: why do we make fun of ourselves? Maybe to get ahead of the joke. I think of Rebel Wilson’s character in Pitch perfect“My name is Fat Amy so bitches like you don’t do it behind my back” is a perfect line. But can we always defang the snake? And should we? I admit I have a hard time listening to some of Sammy Davis Jr.’s self-deprecating comedic “bits.” The most multi-talented member of the Rat Pack, it was only through Sinatra’s intercession that Davis was allowed to stay in the hotels they played. Owning up to our pain doesn’t necessarily transform it.
Being ridiculed in the group chat is now a much-loved pastime among my friends. I wonder if Britain has adopted the Americanism because our own word, “banter,” has become too toxic. Is it too easily used as a defense by louts, who mistake being loud for being funny? Shame, since banter simply means retort. (Nobody 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 a real war, telling me her call sign in the military. She chose Pork Chop. As in, “Hey Pork Chop, this is Bravo 21; message over.” After a while, the guys in her unit started calling her Cupcake instead. Horribly sexist; I laughed out loud when she told me, though. Don’t push the big red button, let me get rid of this hateful laughter.
A laugh can depend on the specificity of tone and the context of a relationship. Context matters, as well as my perception of her intentions. In this case, something about her defiance of gender norms and her utter ineffectiveness. Other relationships matter, whether her colleagues were criticizing her for inclusion or exclusion. There is also a subtle energetic feedback loop. My friend, who is certainly no coward, is telling me this because she anticipates that I will find it funny, which makes her find it funny too.
Comedy, even the most straightforward kind, is sophisticated. Sadly, the internet is great at removing context and nuance. It’s heartbreaking that humor has fallen into the hands of those least suited to handle it. On one side are the people who need everything to be an argument, and on the other are the bigots. Neither of these are my type, and I refuse to pick a team.
Is comedy moral? No, it is more important than that. Humor is both deeply subjective and a social safety valve against dogmatic thinking. Setting rules about what is funny is as futile as trying to explain charm with a protractor and a set square. But just because anything can be funny doesn’t mean everything is.
Needless to say, I immediately downloaded an app to make fun of myself. Fuck me! It responded with some lame jokes that weakly mocked the fact that I don’t post often on X or Instagram, where it collects its data. Too boring to print. AI is bad at making fun of others, not because it’s mean or offensive, but because it’s not funny. AI is incapable of meaningful rapport or 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 analyse comedy, so instead I’m off to call social services to question Sophie. That’s a joke!