The New York Friars Club established the celebrity roast as a club tradition in 1950 with Sam Livingston in the hot seat and a motto of “We only roast the ones we love.” Roasts quickly became regular happenings at the club, and they carried on until the club closed for good in 2024. During those years, the roasts were at times licensed to NBC, Comedy Central, and Netflix. Comedian Jeff Ross has become known as the Roastmaster General for his many performances in recent roasts and says his tough upbringing prepared him for the task.
In 2016, Ross spoke on NPR’s “Fresh Air” about losing both parents while still in his teens. “My uncle Murray — we called him ‘Mean Murray’ — he used to pick on me constantly, but he did it with love,” Ross said. “… He was giving me thick skin. That’s what you need to survive in this world.”
We watched dozens of hours of roasts going back to the 1970s to pick out a handful of the best ones. Here are our five favorites — ranked according to the lineup of roasters and their best jokes, as well as how faithfully each kept to the philosophy of those early Friars Club events — along with links to each one on YouTube or major streaming services.
5. Dean Martin
“The Dean Martin Show” incorporated roasts into its variety/talk format in its final two seasons in 1973 and 1974, after which Martin spun off the segments into a series of 54 specials called “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.” In 1978, he threw himself on the fire, volunteering as the target for an incredible collection of celebrities. Lining up on the dais to take shots at Martin were John Wayne, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Gene Kelly, Tony Orlando, and Gabe Kaplan. Senators Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey also roasted Martin, and the sports world was represented by Muhammad Ali, Joe Namath, and Howard Cosell.
Martin’s roast might have the most impressive lineup of any in history, but we ranked it No. 5 for its repetitive and outdated humor. Nearly every roaster made one or more jokes about Martin’s fondness for alcohol, and many also also aimed some crude remarks at Ruth Buzzi or Angie Dickinson. Highlights included Georgia Engel’s gentle ribbing of Martin, and Ali’s four-minute turn at the mic. After a sharp back-and-forth with Rickles, the boxing legend accused Cosell of riding his coattails to get famous. Ali then turned to Martin and asked, “Why did you invite him?”
Several speakers offered sincere and heartfelt tributes to Martin, most notably Wayne. He said of Martin, “I feel good every time I see him,” then offered a touching toast: “May you live forever, and may the last voice you hear be mine.”
Bob Hope got some of the writing team’s sharpest barbs, including a reference to how Martin and his Rat Pack buddies “made Las Vegas what it is today: the off-ramp between Sodom and Gomorrah.” Martin used his rebuttal time to get in a few return shots and then gave sincere thanks to his roasters, the network, and the audience.
4. Tom Brady
One of the more celebrated roasts in recent memory was the one produced by Netflix in 2024 to honor former NFL quarterback Tom Brady. Kevin Hart was roastmaster, and the lineup included Jeff Ross and Nikki Glaser, along with some of Brady’s former pro football colleagues. Ex-New England Patriots teammates Rob Gronkowski, Randy Moss, and Julian Edelman were on hand, as were team owner Robert Kraft and notoriously stodgy former head coach Bill Belichick. Glaser’s set was an early highlight; she earned a standing ovation and kudos from Hart and Moss with darts like the one referencing Brady’s multiple Super Bowl championships and recent divorce. “You have seven rings,” she said. “Eight now that Giselle [Bundchen] has given one back.”
Belichick was surprisingly clever and self-effacing, defying his reputation as a grump. He even played on an oft-used phrase from his coaching days — “do your job”— in a dig at Gronkowski. “Gronk, I’ve been watching you [as an analyst] on Fox NFL Sunday,” Belichick said, “and I’m begging you, please, stop doing your job. Do another job.”
Brady’s old rival Peyton Manning let fly from the second he took the microphone. “It is great to be here with a bunch of people sitting around, talking smack about Tom Brady,” Manning said, “or as we call that in the Manning family, Thanksgiving.” He then admitted that Brady had the better NFL career by all important measures before getting in the best digs of the night. “Of course, we all know Tom has five more Super Bowl rings than I do,” Manning said. “He also has more touchdowns than I do, more passing yards, more retirements, more fake hair, more TB12 bankruptcies.”
3. Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber was only 21 years old when he was roasted on Comedy Central in 2015, and the star-studded dais didn’t disappoint. Roast veterans Jeff Ross, Kevin Hart, and Natasha Leggero were joined by Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ludacris. Bieber was a willing and delighted participant throughout the evening, starting when — dressed as an angel — he was fake-dropped to the stage from a height of about three Biebers. Hart rushed to provide mock aid to the singer while a gospel choir sang, “You can’t kill Justin Bieber, no matter what you try.”
Pete Davidson provided some of the night’s memorable moments, including an edgy joke about his father and a comparison between O’Neal and the giant ape in the video game “Donkey Kong.” While O’Neal wiped tears of laughter away with his tie, Davidson laughed shakily and begged, “Please don’t eat me.”
Stewart drew some of the night’s biggest laughs with a tall tale about earning immediate respect in prison by stabbing a fellow inmate. “From then on,” she joked, “prison was easier than making blueberry scones. And Shaq, I hope your mom still doesn’t hold a grudge.”
Bieber’s rebuttal at the show’s conclusion revealed a surprising wit, and he went down the row of roasters issuing gentle digs and words of gratitude. Bieber closed with a promise to correct his recent risky behavior and a prediction for his future. “I will not end up broken, pathetic, bitter,” he proclaimed, “or sitting on the dais of somebody else’s roast.”
2. James Franco
The comedians and actors who roasted James Franco in a 2013 Comedy Central roast — now available on Apple TV — had plenty of ways to target the actor. Many of them were among his closest friends, including roastmaster Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Andy Samberg, and Bill Hader. Rogen led off the night by questioning his friend about the evening’s purpose: “Why are we here, James? … I know why I’m here: ’cause whenever you do something without me, it sucks. … Franco, you look like you’re asleep. Did you just read a James Franco book?”
Hader won TVLine’s Performer of the Week for his appearance as the President of Hollywood, a tracksuited executive with a god complex. He skewered the gathered dais as a group before dispensing with personalized sarcastic bits: “I just want to say to everyone up here, you’re welcome. In no other place but Hollywood could these 10 people make the kind of money they make and sleep with the kind of people they sleep with.”
The traditional roast spirit of trading insults among close friends was evident in the constant crossfire of barbs between Rogen, Franco, and Jonah Hill, who delivered one of the cleverest jokes of the night regarding Franco’s film choices. Hill began by explaining that many actors try to alternate between doing “one [film] for them [audiences], and one for me.” But Franco’s philosophy, he said, was “one for them, five for nobody.”
The conviviality of this roast lands awkwardly today; sexual misconduct accusations against Franco from five women have since put a wedge between him and Rogen. Rogen told the New York Times in 2026 that he and Franco no longer speak: “I haven’t worked with him in a really long time and I have no plans to.”
1. Bob Saget
Bob Saget’s coarse, adult-oriented standup comedy flies in the face of his most famous TV character, wholesome dad Danny Tanner on “Full House.” When Comedy Central put together a roast of Saget in 2008, they gathered an impressive roster of roasting talent, including Jeff Ross, Greg Giraldo, Whitney Cummings, and Gilbert Gottfried. You can watch the entire roast on Paramount+ and see Saget’s friends aim their expletive-laden verbal darts at his unsophisticated body of TV work.
His “Full House” co-star John Stamos served as roastmaster for the night, introducing his friend as “the luckiest man and the worst entertainer in the history of show business.” This is another roast in which the panel’s true affection for the guest of honor was clearly evident, and Norm Macdonald’s legendary performance elevates this one to the top of our list. Macdonald broke the roast model entirely to honor his friend; he wasn’t fond of roasts and didn’t want to mock Saget in public.
Macdonald sat hunched behind an LA Times sports section for most of the night and made another surprising choice for his 20 minutes on the mic. He filled his roast set with corny bits from a half-century-old joke book; the confused reaction from the crowd prompted the network to cut more than half of it for broadcast. The old jokes he used were clunky, pun-heavy, and groan-inducing, yet Macdonald stretched the lamest of them into pseudo-insults.
This rebellion against the roast concept was born of the same defiance that got Macdonald dismissed from “Saturday Night Live” in a controversial TV show exit, and it was one of his last memorable performances before Macdonald died in 2021. But the top burn of the night went to Ross, who joked that the night was actually an intervention. “You can keep doing drugs,” he told Saget, “but please stop doing comedy.”
