America sucks. We all know it, but why does it suck?

There is certainly a tendency to look at our country today, and try to find out “where it all went wrong” as if there is a turning point that presented a fork in the road and we, as a society, chose the wrong path. Sometimes people do it to be funny, sometimes it’s delusionally serious, but it is always incorrect. The near infinite amount of variables that compound to create our reality cannot be oversimplified to one single moment. 

OK, except for this one time: The N.Y. Friars Club Roast of Chevy Chase. It is the flashpoint moment that unraveled our civilization.

First of all we need to get into the time frame. The year is 2002, and the world is starting to feel “normal” again after 9/11. It wasn’t really normal, but we have to lie to ourselves a little. Big events like this roast are part of that healing/lying process. But what happened that night, according to legend, left Chevy in tears, humiliated, comforted only by a bald and bespectacled Paul Shaffer. Whatever you think about Chevy Chase as an actor or as a man, this is dark.

Now you might think that 9/11 was a bigger turning point in our nation’s history than the roast of Chevy Chase, but you’re wrong. On 9/11 our national resolve was tested and we met the challenge with a two decades long war, the Patriot Act and fighter jets at football games. Whether or not that was effective is up for debate, but I can tell you this: we did not have a response to making Chevy Chase cry.

Back in 2002, Friars Club Roasts had been airing on Comedy Central for the previous four years. They were kind of a reintroduction of the form for most audiences, and were pretty novel for my generation. The old upscale Dean Martin roasts were a thing of the past, and these new ones had all kinds of salty sailor talk about buttholes and balls and whatnot for the South Park crowd.

Even with this new edgier image, the event was hosted by The Friars Club. They’re a private social club in New York and its members include a lot of comics and celebrities. The roast is a big tradition for them and not only do you have to be a member to be roasted, they have to like you too.

Anyway, Chevy Chase is being honored on this night and to perhaps the producers’ surprise, no one liked him enough to show up. It’s called out numerous times during the show too. Of the original surviving SNL cast only Laraine Newman shows up because she’s obviously a sweetheart.

Not a ton of co-stars from his films show up either. Martin Short and Steve Martin send an extremely lazy but funny pretape about how they’re filming Three Amigos 2 without him, a joke that cuts deeper with every project those two do together without Chevy.

Randy Quaid sends a difficult to decipher video that’s kind of an homage to the Vacation movies but also kind of horny poem? I guess it’s fitting for Randy, but the point is he didn’t show up.

So this sets itself up for a night that doesn’t really follow the spirit of the roast. The Friars Club always makes it a point to hammer home the message that they “only roast the ones they love.” This night we got a bunch of comics from a younger generation like Marc Maron, Todd Barry and Lisa Lampanelli putting in a night’s work to make fun of someone they may or may not even really be a fan of. It’s pretty funny! But it’s not really in the spirit of a Friar’s Club Roast, and it’s this that allows us to draw a near-direct line from this roast to the January 6th Capitol Riot.

This was the final televised Friars Club Roast before Comedy Central started doing them independently. While the utter embarrassment of Chevy, and the Friars Club no longer producing the roasts is a complete coincidence, the result of a contract expiring, it still left a nasty stink in the air that carried over to the roasts that followed. 

The standards begin to slip. No more unwritten rules about who to roast and who gets to roast them. Pandora’s Box was opened and now everyone is allowed to be really mean as long as it’s kinda funny.

Pandora’s Box was opened and now everyone is allowed to be really mean as long as it’s kinda funny.

At the time, what may have been a mad scramble to find roasters for this night and also promote their own show, The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert accepts the challenge and lights up Chevy. It’s very funny, but pretty mean, and Colbert readily admits he feels uncomfortable doing it in the moment. These men don’t even know each other, forget “love.” 

But he’s a natural. Who knew? A guy with no stand up experience brings the house down with his over the top charm.

This stand out performance provides a clear path for Colbert to be a solo star. He’d soon have his own show, and eventually land the gig of roaster again at a White House Correspondents Dinner during the George W. Bush presidency. It was praised at the time for being a watershed moment of comedy speaking truth to power. While I’d personally argue that it didn’t really have any tangible effect on the world, it was very entertaining!

Not only did that shine a light on the White House Correspondents Dinner, an event that hadn’t been relevant in years, it made it a new must-book event for anyone in the upper levels of comedy. A few years later during the Obama administration, Seth Meyers would take the stage and land some deserved hits on then-civilian Donald Trump for being a sad loser. Great stuff, but many people have speculated that that night you can see it in his eyes: he’s going to become president out of spite.

And he did! How nuts is that?! I’m not saying that the Trump presidency was the ultimate stain on our country or that things are amazing now, but it definitely sucked. Beyond sucking, it also ushered in a new era of complete disregard for any norms associated with the office. The kind of things you technically don’t need, but when you don’t have them, it really feels like the wheels could come off of this thing at a moment’s notice.

So when history looks back at our dark age defined by twitter ratios, publicly dunking on political enemies, and yes even domestic terrorism, I hope they recognize that it could have all been avoided if Chevy Chase had any friends.

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