Worse than a minstrel show

"By the way, Chuck D was going to be here, but it turns out the D stands for dignity." - One of the comics at the Flavor Flav roast.

My bad about being a week late on this, but I did end up seeing that Flavor Flav roast this weekend. I figured I might check it out back when it first aired, but I ended up missing. I guess Comedy Central figured no one who would be watching a roast of Flavor Flav would have any sort of conflict with the season finale of HBO's bizarre new John from Cincinatti, which I enjoy quite a bit.

Then I thought for certain that they'd be rerunning the shit out of it all last week the way these cable networks do. I looked for it Monday and Tuesday, but it hadn't occurred to me that it would air on Comedy Central rather than VH1, with all of the other Flavor Flav series. Again, you'll have to excuse me. I basically can't be bothered to watch anything on TV unless it's on HBO.

But I happened to be flipping through the channels Saturday night (I had to be at the BGM at the ass crack of dawn Sunday morning) and there it was, the Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav.

I was kinda upset that even though it was kinda late (I think it was 9 p.m.) they were playing a half-censored version. Sometimes, especially on weekend nights, they air comedy specials with the curses left in. But then it occurred to me that they're not going to play the dirty version on TV ever, so that people will be forced to shell out for the DVD. Which is lame.

In fact, I found the whole thing to be kinda lame. As much I like the idea of a celebrity roast, so far I've found all of these Comedy Central roasts to be kinda soft. Every time they have one of these things on Comedy Central someone says something that's kinda insensitive, and of course everyone makes a big deal out of it. But isn't the whole idea of a roast that everything the dais says is highly insensitive?

My favorite lines of the evening were Jimmy Kimmel's remarks that Flav left more black kids homeless than Hurricane Katrina, and that he's a worse father than Chris Benoit. Kimmel also had the balls to suggest that Comedy Central should fire Carlos Mencia, who wasn't even there (and who fucking sucks balls), which suggests to me that he was the only one there big-time enough to not give a shit what he said.

But that was really about as bad as it got, which is surprising when you consider that Flavor Flav is a 50 year-old crackhead with eight kids by six different mothers, not to mention his late-career surge as the star of his own minstrel show on VH1. (If you want to hear a real roast, you should check out the ones the Rev. Bob Levy does on the Howard Stern show. Not that I listen to Howard Stern or anything. That would just be racist.)

My guess is that Comedy Central figured that Flavor Flav is kind of a 'tard and that he might not realize that the whole point of a roast is to say the most hurtful shit you can possibly say about a person. Plus, what with the incidents with Michael Richards and Don Imus already this year, they couldn't let shit get too hairy, lest that one nappy headed ho who was protesting BET's Hot Ghetto Mess organize some sort of a boycott.