The comedy roast is bleeping sacred.

The term “roast” has a specific meaning in the culture. A specific purpose, too.

Anything goes. Anything. Goes.

Repeat as necessary.

And it’s all in good fun. We watch for the pleasure of hearing the very worst things said about famous people.

“The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” set the gold standard. These galas featured old-school stars like Joe Namath, Don Rickles, George Burns, Gene Kelly and many more excoriating their peers.

Comedy Central took that baton in the modern era. The new targets were oh, so familiar and certainly varied:

• Charlie Sheen
• Joan Rivers
• Roseanne Barr
• William Shatner
• Pamela Anderson
• Donald J. Trump
• Justin Bieber

NOTE: Adult material in the following clip reel (but necessary for context):

Comedy Central’s roast series took a knee after the 2019 roast of Alec Baldwin. That was no accident.

The woke mind virus was at full strength at the time. A few short months later, the George Floyd riots poured fuel on the Cancel Culture blaze.

Offensive jokes became a fireable offense. Now, roasts are back.

“The Roast of Tom Brady” in 2024 made it official. That night featured some of the most offensive gags ever uttered and made stars of both Nikki Glaser and Tony Hinchcliffe.

Guess what happened next? Nothing, more or less.

Oh, a few news outlets attempted some “outrage”/”backlash” stories, but it never amounted to much.

Why? Woke was on the run at that point. Comedy was roaring back, thanks to rebel comedians like Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon and Shane Gillis. 

We recognized roasts for what they were, and not who might be offended by them.

Which brings us to Netflix’s “The Roast of Kevin Hart.” 

The most recent blaze featured more of the same, including some ghoulish gags targeting the dead. Several comics joked about Pete Davidson’s father, a firefighter who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Davidson was there, on stage, and he laughed along with the gallows humor.

He got it. Or, at the very least, he pretended he did. And he gave as good as he got.

Consider this awkward Davidson line recalling the 2025 assassination of conservative hero Charlie Kirk. Note: The following joke is R-rated and mature:

Tony Hinchcliffe is here, looking like both a child molester, and the doll they give the child to show where he touched them. Tony reminds me of Charlie Kirk in that he’s definitely been on camera letting a guy [bleep] in his throat.

Gross. Inappropriate. Too soon?

Not in a roast. That phrase doesn’t exist in that context.

Newsbusters, an essential site that breaks down liberal media bias, raged against the joke. It’s “dangerous dehumanization.” HiT disagrees, despite considering Newsbusters one of the most valuable resources on the web.

The site wasn’t alone. Libs of Tik Tok and Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire fame also cried foul over the crack.

We’ve seen that “dehumanizing” charge levied against much of what late-night TV has to offer. That’s different in context. TV monologues aren’t roast-level affairs. It’s an entirely separate delivery system.

Plus, roasts tend to be one-night-only affairs. Late-night hacks demean their political foes five nights a week, often in collusion with Fake News narratives.

A roast functions in a different fashion. Yet some comics don’t even get that.

Comic actor Lil’ Rey Howery put out a video blasting Netflix’s special for the night’s George Floyd gag. That’s “disgusting,” he said, wishing the crowd had booed the bit.

It didn’t.

Why? They know that anything goes with a roast. Again. 

We’ll let comedian Adam Yenser have the last word.

Roasts are understood by both the performers and audience as a venue for dark, edgy, and offensive material. Jokes are intentionally controversial.

If you wanna complain about the Charlie Kirk joke but not the George Floyd joke, you’re a hypocrite. If you wanna complain about…

— Adam Yenser (@CleanComedian69) May 13, 2026

The post That Charlie Kirk Roast Joke Wasn’t Out of Line appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

In July 1998, the Rome Statute created the legal basis for the International Criminal Court (ICC), a body designed to “guarantee lasting respect for and the enforcement of international justice.” The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was also created to initiate investigations and seek arrest warrants for anyone charged with crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction. Article 70 of the Statute empowers the Court to prosecute individuals for bribery, intimidation, or corrupt influence, but no one seems to have entertained the possibility that the prosecutor himself might be guilty of one or more of these offences. This oversight looks spectacularly naive in retrospect.

On 28 April, the Wall Street Journal reported allegations that the Qatari government had said it would “look after” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan if he indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Khan sought arrest warrants for both men on 20 May 2024 and denies receiving any such assurances from Qatar or any other state prior to doing so. Arrest warrants were also sought for Hamas leaders, but not for the Iranian and Qatari officials who financed and armed the group for years. In November 2025, the Guardian reported that Qatar had allegedly hired a private intelligence firm in Britain to discredit a Malaysian ICC staffer who has accused Khan of sexual assault. If substantiated, this conduct could raise questions about the applicability of Article 70. Notably, Khan’s decision to pursue Israeli leaders for war crimes was taken shortly after the emergence of the assault allegations, which he also categorically denies.

Allegations like these highlight the threat that financial incentives and judicial activism can pose to the pursuit of international justice. The notion that international courts are impervious to foreign influence is a delusion that The Hague has nurtured for decades, and it helps to explain why the system has failed to deter the commission of atrocities. This is a problem of institutional design. These courts were forged in debates about competing state interests and their independence from the UN Security Council, which baked power politics and reputational management into their architecture from the outset. A decade ago, these courts were widely depicted as neo-colonial instruments, advancing Western political interests against African states under the guise of human rights. Today, they have overcorrected into postcolonial theory, and like virtually every other liberal institution in the modern West, they have been captured by self-destructive ideologies and hostile foreign interests.