Last night, I caught about 5 minutes of Comedy Central's Roast Of Joan Rivers, which was long enough for me to learn that the funniest things about Joan Rivers, according to her lackluster roasters, are the fact that she has a vagina, the fact that she has an old vagina, the fact that she's, like, really old, and the fact that OMG she's had so much plastic surgery on her crazy plastic surgery face. So, you know, basically all the stuff that Joan Rivers herself makes fun of all the time.
The problem with roasting someone like Joan Rivers is that Joan Rivers has been self-roasting for about thirty years, so the whole show is at best a re-heating. (Zing!) Comedy Central should really focus their efforts on making fun of someone who has absolutely no sense of humor—either about himself or in general. Maybe someone from noted comedy mirage Entourage? Someone like, say, professional shouter Jeremy Piven? He has no idea what's funny.
From The NY Daily News:
Backstage at Alexa Chung's MTV talk show on Thursday, the Entourage star got into a screaming match with fellow comic Chris Kattan over the fishy situation.
Kattan greeted Piven with a snarky, "So, what are you here to promote, your Broadway play?"
Piven, who famously dropped out of "Speed the Plow" in December, is in a legal battle with producers who believe the actor fabricated his [mercury poisoning] in order to get out of completing his contract, and was none too happy to be reminded of the incident.
The actor sniped back irritably, "Well, what are you here to promote? Mango?"
Says an insider, "After some back and forth, Jeremy said something really personal to Chris that basically attacked his career. He said 'Whoa, man – I thought we were just fooling around here.'"
Not the right thing to say to the man who plays Ari Gold, apparently. "I'm getting sued for that s—t!" the actor shouted. "It's not funny!"
Our source adds, "Jeremy slammed the green room door right in Chris' face, and about 20 people in the hallway outside could hear him yelling obscenities. He was furious.
"Chris felt really badly about the whole thing, so about 15 minutes later he tried to approach Jeremy again to apologize, to tell him he was just kidding and that he didn't mean to offend in any way. But Jeremy wasn't having it at all. He slammed the door in Chris' face AGAIN."
Ooh. A green-room-door-slamming fight between the former SNL actor most likely to be mistaken for Rob Schneider, and the guy from Entourage who wears a Justin Timberlake costume to all public appearances despite the fact that it makes him look like a 19-century carnival barker—this is the caliber of backstage beef happening at MTV nowadays. Makes you long for the days whenCourtney Love would interrupt an interview with Madonna by throwing her compact, or when Vanilla Ice would beat up mannequins, or literally anything else, right?
But I digress. Two things Jeremy Piven should know about Jeremy Piven jokes:
1. Sushi-gate will never get old—especially as long as you demonstrate you don't have a sense of humor about claiming you can't work because, "Ow, I ate too much sushi."
2. The fact that you're getting sued over sushi-gate makes it more funny, not less.
Hope that helps!