Looking for a stronger roast

THE comedian Jeffrey Ross sounded perplexed. “This is impossible,” he told the crowd. “How do you embarrass a crackhead who wears a Viking helmet?”

It was a Sunday evening earlier this month, and Ross, an insult comic, was speaking to several hundred attendees packed into a Warners soundstage in Burbank. Ross was referring to the guest of honor, who had made a grand entrance earlier in the evening, using wires and a harness to fly high above the heads of audience members. On the dais, this diminutive man of the hour sat on a golden throne and wore a flamboyant blue velvet suit, the kind of garb rarely seen outside the “blaxploitation” movies of the early 1970s. Throughout the evening, he met the crudest insults from Ross, Jimmy Kimmel, Snoop Dogg and other roasters by jumping up and down, clapping with childish delight, his smile a veritable prospector’s pan of gold chunks.

This is what happens when a major cable network, namely Comedy Central, decides to roast Flavor Flav, known for his turns on VH1’s “Flavor of Love,” “Strange Love” and “The Surreal Life” reality series. The roast was taped earlier this month, and a heavily edited version will premiere Aug. 12. A former member of the rap group Public Enemy, Flav is the crackpot centerpiece of “Flavor of Love,” an over-the-top reality series that functions as a kind of grotesque, hip-hop parody of “The Bachelor” (basic plot: assorted gold diggers, hangers-on and publicity seekers vie for Flav’s ever-wandering romantic attention). Born William Drayton Jr., Flav is perhaps best known for his sartorial flair, including the large clocks that he wears like pendants around his neck.

Flav is a celeb-reality train wreck, to be sure, and as any watcher of “Flavor of Love” knows, he can occasionally be an amusing wreck, when he is not being a scary, “could any human be this whacked?” wreck. To some, he’s a lovable parody of the crazy ghetto denizens feared by white bigots. To others he’s the living embodiment of offensive stereotypes.

But still: With guests of honor like this, what on earth has happened to the fine art of celebrity TV roasts? More important, was “My Fair Brady’s” Christopher Knight busy that weekend?

If such insulting queries were posed in front of Flav, he would likely emit one of his chugging, nasally laughs, bug out his eyes and then cry, as he is wont to do, “Yeah, boy!” He’s known for shouting out “Yeah, boy!” or his stage name (“Flav-Uh Flaaav!”) whenever he can’t think of anything else to say. Which is often.

How, indeed, does one roast such a person? His act already comes pre-roasted.

As ace insult comic Lisa Lampanelli told Flav at the roast: “Enough with the clock

You haven’t had to be anywhere in 13 years.”

Comedy Central has in recent years undertaken a noble mission to revive the celebrity TV roast, a format that back in the ‘70s Dean Martin adapted from the infamously naughty Friars Club roasts in New York and Beverly Hills. The New York Friars’ roasts stretch back 100 years, according to Barry Dougherty, a club historian and author.

“The Friars are extremely eclectic in choosing candidates,” Dougherty wrote me in an e-mail, although Flav is cut from a wholly different cloth than some of the recent honorees Dougherty mentioned: Billy Crystal, Donald Trump and Kelsey Grammer. He added: “It’s best to find someone with a tough hide.”

Comedy Central has updated the roasts as an annual TV event, sponsoring bawdy, banquet-style takedowns of Hugh Hefner (filmed just days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the affair featured a now-legendary performance by comic Gilbert Gottfried), Jeff Foxworthy and, last year, William Shatner.

But Flav?

Well, the A-list has gotten rather self-serious, explains Comedy Central President Doug Herzog.

“The very best people to do are the rich, famous and powerful,” Herzog told me (while Flav certainly qualifies as famous, and possibly as rich, “powerful” does not seem an apt descriptor for him). “People enjoy seeing them knocked off their stool a little bit,” Herzog said -- but most of the roast candidates are uninterested in enduring the kind of abuse hurled by Ross, Lampanelli and other insult comics. “It’s not like it was in the old days. It’s hard to get the biggest stars of the day to poke fun at themselves. They’re a little more thin-skinned.”

Howard Stern is just one of the potential big-name roastees the network has repeatedly chased with no success, Herzog said. “They say, ‘We’re gonna do our own,’ and then they never do it,” he said of Stern’s handlers.

So, Comedy Central these days has to stick with folks like Pamela Anderson and, yes, Flav. That is, people who are widely recognized and yet will also agree to have professional comedians and business associates feed their foibles through a meat grinder, all for the amusement of viewers at home.

Luckily for Comedy Central, our popular culture is shifting to accommodate the celebrity of persons with limited talent but infinite personality, such as Flav. His life and “career” have become a joke everyone can enjoy.

“Reality TV has become a form where the most outrageous people can succeed,” said Janice Min, editor in chief of Us Weekly.

“Someone willing to expose himself as a fool and let America laugh at him, and with him, has ended up with huge success and a second act,” Min said. “Embarrassment is the theme of the whole enterprise. There’s no one watching these shows that isn’t kind of in on the joke.”

Dignity does seem a purely theoretical concept for Flav, who seemed genuinely pleased when Lampanelli declared to the roast crowd that he had gone “from Public Enemy to public embarrassment.”

Nor did he seem bothered when Kimmel joked that VH1 titled the series “Flavor of Love” because “ ‘Black Guy Impregnates 20 Whores’ wasn’t catchy enough.” Some of the “Flavor” girls, seated in the audience near porn star Ron Jeremy, responded by directing obscene gestures toward Kimmel.

In fact, the only time Flav expressed a recognizably human emotion came at the end of the roast, when he took the microphone for a wheezing, mostly incomprehensible monologue (with exemplary wisdom, Snoop Dogg sat through most of it with his hoodie sweat shirt covering his face).

Flav made a few lame jokes at the expense of roaster Brigitte Nielsen, who recently emerged from a stint in rehab and whose doomed romance with him was chronicled on “Strange Love.” Then he suddenly murmured, in a tone that sounded sincere, “I love you, Gitte.”

It was an out-of-place sentiment for a potty-mouthed roast, and Flav quickly snapped back into character, sans Viking helmet. He eyed the increasingly uncomfortable crowd.

“Flav-uh Flaaaaaaav,” he crooned.

--

The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com.