The Sacred Art of Busting Chops

I want to talk about one of the greatest roast comics of all time. This guy was absolutely ruthless, but what made him great was that he never settled for just calling somebody an idiot. He’d build an entire visual around exactly why they were an idiot and leave you with an image you couldn’t get out of your head.

At one point, he’s talking about people who love pointing out everybody else’s flaws, and he basically says, "Picture a guy walking around with a two-by-four sticking six feet out of his face." This guy stops somebody on the street and says, “Excuse me, Steve, I noticed a very small flaw in your character,” while every time he turns his head he’s taking out six people just trying to get to the market.

Maybe deal with the lumber first, Steve.

And this guy had range. He goes after rich people, too. He could have just said money can corrupt you. Fine. Nobody remembers that. Instead, he says it would be easier to shove a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.

You can picture some rich guy in the crowd immediately trying to negotiate the premise. “Okay, but how big is the needle?”

No, Todd. That’s exactly why we’re having this conversation.

But my favorite roast was aimed at one of his closest friends. This was a guy he loved and trusted, somebody he’d given enormous responsibility to. So one day the friend gets comfortable enough to pull him aside and basically say, “Hey, I know you’ve got a plan here, but I have some notes.”

And this guy turns around and says, “Get behind me, Satan.”

Jesus Christ.

Literally.

Jesus Christ was the original Roast Master General, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. If Jesus started a sentence with, “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” somebody was about to get cooked. That was Jesus tapping the microphone. The second you heard “Verily, verily,” you had to be looking around the room thinking, oh no, who’s it gonna be?

And nobody was safe. That friend he called Satan was Peter, one of his closest disciples, the guy Jesus literally called the rock on which he’d build his Church. You’d think being the rock buys you a little grace. Apparently not.

“Hey Jesus, I was thinking maybe we could…”

“GET BEHIND ME, SATAN.”

“Got it. Bad idea. I’ll come back with some other options.”

But Jesus saved some of his strongest material for the religious leaders, because those were the people who were supposed to know better. He called them blind guides, whitewashed tombs, and a brood of vipers.

Brood of vipers is an insane thing to call somebody at a religious gathering. Imagine walking up afterward and saying, “Beautiful service today, really loved the message,” and getting, “BROOD OF VIPERS.”

“Great. We’ll see you at the pancake breakfast.”

And whitewashed tombs might be even more vicious. He’s basically telling these respected religious leaders, “You look fantastic on the outside. Inside? Dead people.”

That’s not constructive criticism. That’s a Netflix special.

Then he tells them they’re the kind of people who strain a gnat out of their drink and swallow a camel.

Another camel.

Apparently Jesus loved camel material.

Camels were the observational comedy of first-century Galilee. “What is the deal with camels?”

But underneath all these burns is the reason I think Jesus was actually so good at this. He wasn’t roasting people because he needed the room to love him. He wasn’t humiliating strangers to make himself feel superior.

He was trying to wake people up. And sometimes the truth that wakes you up isn’t, “You’re doing great.” Sometimes it’s, “Dude, you have a tree sticking out of your face.”

That’s what separates a great roast from just being cruel. There’s truth underneath it. Somebody sees the ridiculous thing about you that everybody else can see except you, and if it’s coming from the right place, they love you enough to say it.

Which is probably why that two-by-four joke still works two thousand years later. We’ve become professional speck inspectors. We can find a flaw in somebody we’ve never met based on something they posted eleven years ago. We’ll zoom in, screenshot it, circle it, repost it, and announce, “Everybody, look at this speck.”

Meanwhile we’re hauling around enough lumber to build a three-bedroom house.

And we never turn the camera around.

That’s the part of Jesus’s comedy that hurts. You start out laughing at the idiot walking around with a tree sticking out of his face, judging everybody else.

Then you realize you’re the idiot.

So bust chops. Call out hypocrisy. Laugh at your friends and let your friends laugh at you. For God’s sake, laugh at yourself.

We’re all ridiculous, we’re all flawed, and sometimes loving somebody means telling them something they really don’t want to hear.

Just check your own face first.