The sharpest darts are ready in an unexpected ring, a stage. Comedy Central is back with the fourth season of Roast Battle, the channel’s original format produced in collaboration with El Terrat (The Mediapro Studio), where well-known faces from our country star in battles where everything is allowed except physical contact. And yes, everything is allowed, even more than allowed. As Eva Soriano, this time a Roast Batlle judge, acknowledges, “I’ve seen people destroying themselves, skinning themselves in a way that… you can’t even imagine.”
It’s wild humor, humor in which “the lowest instincts and the worst insults surface,” says Eva Soriano, but they always seek a balance, that of a scale in which one side is the “bad host” and the other another one that makes you laugh.
“The balance between attack and comedy has to be very well sought because when a joke is brutal but not funny, you risk it,” explains the presenter. “Black humor is very difficult because if you don’t make people laugh, you give it to them. And there are moments when they give it to them. Of course, as the program is edited, we save some hosts, some very big ones,” he confesses about a fourth season in which humor more than ever, but barbaric humor, the one that offends the ‘offended’, is more present than ever.
In the program the lowest instincts emerge, the worst insults, how energetic we are
The curious thing about Roast Battle is that neither the best comedians nor the most scathing comedians get on this ring of humor, they get on characters who probably if they were faced with jokes like the ones released on the show would rarely laugh. What would happen if Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo faced a duel of humor? First, it would be tremendous if they accepted and, second, if they did, perhaps they would be flesh and blood again because, as Dani Mateo says, “humor liberates.”
“I wish that all the battles were with humor and that all the wars were settled on a stage. Humor has always been necessary. Is humor more necessary than ever? It is not even necessary to respond,” he says.
And that is the objective of Roast Battle when on its stage he plants Jordi Cruz with Pepe Rodríguez, Leticia Dolera with Eduardo Casanova, Arturo González-Campos against Juan Gómez-Jurado and… Here comes the hook and the great battle par excellence this season: Esperanza Aguirre against Pilar Rahola.
“The battle between the two of them left me crazy,” admits Dani Mateo, who refuses to reveal a single detail of this fight between lionesses. However, the comedian and presenter can be moved by emotion: “The two came in political mode, but they started fencing and ended up doing the Maximum Fighting Championship (UFC, for its acronym in English).”
It is the most tense battle of this entire season and of all the seasons of Roast Battle, and this is as far as it can be read. The quarrels of the past, which are not few, are resolved in a fight between the lawyer and politician Esperanza Aguirre and the journalist, analyst and independentista Pilar Rahola. As if you get Santiago Abascal and Carles Puigdemont into the ring.
“It started out as a foil battle, but it lasted 10 seconds,” continues Mateo. “When one gave him the first host, the other went to the sack. They herd in such a way that they had to be separated. Of the four editions we have had with Roast Battle, it has been the heaviest battle,” he says excitedly.
Roast Battle is that, but taken to a humor that we are no longer used to. It’s like going back to the days of Tuesday and Thirteen, the humor that is now censored, to that 80’s humor that marked an entire generation, not only of spectators but especially of comedians. Comedians who now have to measure each word so as not to offend. “They are cycles”, Dani Mateo describes it, who is convinced that this “aggressive humor, with a fang”, which prevailed in Spain for so long, will return. “Look, I’m a kid from the 80s and that was Vietnam, so nothing offends me because I was raised by wolves,” he says with his particular and incisive sense of humor, like that of that fang, the comedian .
What Dani Mateo is referring to is that in Roast Battle he lets himself have humor and say whatever comes to mind without gagging ahead of time in case one, another or many are going to be offended and are going to go to sack for whoever does it or says it. Because as Dani Mateo says “everyone likes this deep down, what happens is that people are very liars”.
It’s like boxing, if you do it in the street it’s a crime, but in a ring it’s normal and allowed
Comedy Central’s Roast Battle, in addition to being a very present humor in the Anglo-Saxon world, are the jokes that you make when no one sees you, but in Roast Battle you make them so that they see you because it is the small agreement that those who reach participate: here you can. It is the humor that is made in hiding. “It’s like boxing, if you do it on the street it’s a crime, but in a ring it’s normal and allowed,” concludes Mateo.
“There is nothing that unites you more than turning green with a person,” adds Eva Soriano. “Imagine 15 minutes beating (dialectical) hosts to another person. The roast is a liberating format between two people who have a lot to say to each other and a lot of desire and when they finish all that is left is love,” she argues.
Because? Because he is “therapeutic”, admit Soriano and Mateo. Laughter has always been. Margaret Stuber, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, conducted experiments in which groups of children plunged their hands into ice-cold water. She found that if they were watching humorous videos, they tolerated pain better and ended up describing the experience as “less unpleasant.”
“Life hurts, it is very brutal and the blackest humor makes life. It is a small revenge to go to a theater and take everything that hurts you, everything that worries you, everything that makes you come down and laugh at all that. You go out and stay like God. And then you suffer again, which is what this valley of tears is about”, concludes Dani Mateo
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