TVSquad

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Joan Rivers for the Boston Globe. She was playing a local theatre, and I hadn't yet had a chance to talk to her, and I wanted to talk a bit about her past in Second City and as a pioneering female comic. But since a lot of her shtick is slamming celebrities, and she helped invent what I guess you'd call "red carpet comedy," I thought I'd try to find a couple of people to do a point/counterpoint. Funny thing is, I couldn't find anyone for the counterpoint, anyone who wanted to go on record saying anything uncomplimentary against Rivers.

You can find plenty of people who will make jokes about her plastic surgery, or her failed talk show from the 80s, or her TV marketing, but that all seems a bit superficial. No one seemed to have a terribly valid criticism outside of those clichés. And that's what I think you'll see at the Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers Roast Sunday (10PM). From the clips I've seen, some of the sharper comics have found a new approach to those tropes, and you'll see plenty of plastic surgery jokes. And I'm sure you'll hear plenty of them from Rivers herself (a debt, there, I think owed to Phyllis Diller).

The traditional comedy roast has been hijacked by the cable networks and reproduced with more disappointing results than a sperm bank run by General Motors.

Comedy Central has done the best job for the most part while others like A&E's extremely mismanaged Gene Simmons Roast made for lower quality television are as horrific as those painfully dated Dean Martin's Roasts that are sold on infomercials in the wee small hours of the morning.

The secret to doing a good roast isn't really that much of a secret: hire people who are actually paid to be funny. That's why the Roast of Joan Rivers could be the best one yet.

Ah, the celebrity roast. Comedy Central resurrected the tried and true comedian ass-kiss off with hilarious specials featuring Denis Leary, Flavor Flav, Bob Saget and William #*$&$ing Shatner. Then came the capper: a roast of music legend Willie Nelson. It was a shift in evolution so great, it could have made Charles Darwin buy into the theory of intelligent design.

Then the network caused a global groan so loud that it shifted the tectonic plates when they announced that Nelson had to cancel and they would replace him with Larry the Cable Guy.

It's such an obvious and safe choice that might be a good recipe for ratings, but it's a sure fire recipe for boring. Here are the iconic stars who would have made much better kindling for a white hot comedy roast.

Comedy Central's roasts were one of the few things the network used to do right post-South Park. They didn't go for the big names. They went for the funniest names, the people who lended themselves to the kind of mean-spirited mockery that let comics be honest but also let the audience know they were just having fun.

This time around, it's hard to see how any self-respecting comic that makes fun of Larry the Cable Guy will not let the audience know they are just joking.

Comedy Central announced that the hunting cap-wearing, sleeveless shirt-wearing, catchphrase-drilling stand-up comic will be the next "celebrity" to take the hot seat in their annual roast.

Bob Saget's Comedy Central roast was filmed Sunday night, and the typically raunchy affair may have crossed the line a little bit. Despite being a famously foul-mouthed comedian himself, Saget is best known for playing warm and fuzzy Danny Tanner on Full House. It was because of this famous role that most of the jokes centered on two of his diminutive co-stars: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Whether it was Gilbert Gottfried suggesting that Saget seduced the twins with chocolate milkshakes or Uncle Jesse himself, John Stamos, saying things like, "The whole time Bob and I were doing Full House, he was also hosting America's Funniest Home Videos. His entire job consisted of saying 'Take a look at this' which is what he used to say to Mary Kate in her dressing room," the subject of inappropriate relations with children was apparently a high source of comedy.