At various points during the shooting of “The Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff” (which airs 10 p.m. EDT Sunday), nearly everyone on the dais got burned.
Sure, this is a show that is supposed to take aim at Hasselhoff, but the roasters also turned their barbs on each other. Not everyone thought it was funny.
Jerry Springer didn’t find the humor in a joke by Jeffrey Ross about Springer’s parents and the Holocaust. And in the show’s most cringe-worthy moment, Whitney Cummings handed a tongue-lashing about financial setbacks and sexual activity to Pamela Anderson, who found it none too funny.
After the show, Cummings started out by saying Anderson may have been offended, then backtracked to say she didn’t think she was. Then Cummings admitted she may have been projecting some of her own guilt of the jokes on herself.
“Was Pam mad at me? I definitely did not want to hurt her feelings,” Cummings said after the taping. “It’s a roast. I said mean things about everybody. People don’t need to be sensitive about it. I sensed near the end of all this, she was [getting sensitive]. Maybe I am projecting because I felt like I was going a little too far.
“When you write ‘roast’ jokes, you can’t take people’s feelings into play. That’s just the nature of these kinds of things.”
Roaster Greg Giraldo says the roasts sometimes get the best of their targets, although all of the jokes are done in jest. “Toward the end, there seemed to be a little tension from Pam,” he said. “We thought because she had done a roast in the past that she was ready for a real pounding. But she was getting it a little too much near the end, and she was getting a little tense.”
During a commercial break, Cummings reached out to Anderson and told her she was sorry if she was hurt. Anderson shook her head in acknowledgment of the apology.
However, during the break, Anderson also walked the stage and looked to someone in the crowd and asked how much longer the roast was going to go on. She later got a warm hug from Hasselhoff, who enjoyed the roast.
“As long as they don’t say anything about my mom, who died recently, or my kids, I’m OK,” he said. “If they do, I’m coming after them.”
The comics stayed away from his mother and, for the most part, his children. They preferred to pick on his obsessive drinking, the video of him slurring his words while eating a cheeseburger, his bad acting and horrible singing.
From roast master Seth MacFarlane’s seat, the roast went well for Hasselhoff.
“He seemed to be loving every minute of it,” MacFarlane said.
