title:  Trump Made Comedy Central Sorry They Ever Wanted To Roast Him In 2011
text: The Comedy Central roasts of celebrities are well known and hilarious, for the most part. While it doesn t look like the roastees know what s going on, and that everything is entirely off-the-cuff, the truth is that there is a lot of preparation ahead of the actual roast. Roastees get some input, even getting to tell the comedy writers what subjects are off-limits for jokes, but, beyond that, they don t dictate very much.And then there s Donald Trump. Putting his roast together seems to have been one long, horrific chore for the Comedy Central team assigned to it. In fact, that roast is perhaps some of the strongest evidence we ve got that Trump is unconscionably thin-skinned, and will continue to be after the election. Roastees for the Comedy Central roasts know what s involved. They know they re going to be skewered. If they don t like the idea, they don t have to do it.It makes us want to look at Trump and say,  DUH!  At Comedy Central, Trump apparently wanted to dictate everything, all the way down to the level of beauty in the women who were to escort him on stage. According to the stage manager: The proposed woman [who would take his coat onstage], Trump said, was  not somebody he wanted to be associated with at that moment,  Ferkle recalled.  In other words, she was not pretty enough. To appease Trump, Comedy Central moved the actress elsewhere on the stage, Ferkle said. The show went on. That s fairly typical Trumpian misogyny, so not all that surprising. What s perhaps more surprising were the other ways that Trump drove the staff up the wall. For instance, he was apparently giving the show s writers and producers hell over whether jokes about his hair were allowed. The lead writer, Ray James, tried working with Trump on why hair jokes were a necessary part of the roast. Trump resisted, because of course he did: I had to explain to him why he needed to have some jokes about his own hair. I said,  You have to own it. If you have a great hair joke, you will be impervious to hair jokes.' Instead, Trump kept nixing the hair jokes, and wanted to replace one of them with a simple,  Look how great [my hair] looks. Because that s just hilarious. But perhaps the most annoying thing was that the writers had to draft multiple rebuttals for Trump. The rebuttal comes at the end of the roast, when the roastee gets up and turns it all back on his or her roasters. Trump was returning scripts marked up entirely with black Sharpies, including blacking out punchlines.Nobody blacks out punchlines, according to the roast s producers and writers. One writer, Jesse Joyce, said: I have done this a long time and nobody blacks out punchlines. [Scrapping punchlines represents] a classic lack of an understanding of how a joke works. And Trump couldn t be consistent about his edits (if, indeed, they can be called that), either. He took out some opportunities to be crass while wallowing in others. He also changed some of the jokes from  funny  to  not funny;  again, showing a fundamental unwillingness to even try and understand what was being put before him: Trump made a few lackluster attempts at cracking wise. He changed a joke meant to slam [Seth] MacFarlane from:  The only way you ll ever draw a crowd is with a pencil.  Trump s revision:  The only crowd you ll attract is flies.' He also wanted to roast the entire dais at once by, well, being entirely himself. How this is even a joke is beyond us, since everything he does is to feel superior to everyone on the planet: Their [sic] all losers and I like associating with loser because it makes me feel even better about myself. It got to the point where Ray James just wanted to destroy Trump in any way possible: I begged any writer to get on board,  James said.  Let s write jokes about this guy having a small cock.   I wanted to destroy this man and expose him as having a tiny penis because that will hurt him more than any jokes about his family or orange skin.' That didn t work. Furthermore, given the fact that Trump just had to talk about his penis size in response to Rubio s jab about his tiny hands during a televised debate, it s likely the dick jokes probably wouldn t have made it in anyway. If they had, he probably would have lost it up onstage.The entire roast was classic Trump. He sat on the stage with a tight smile, not really responding, much the same way he did at the 2011 White House correspondents dinner when Obama roasted him. Despite knowing what was coming, he couldn t take anyone making fun of him and probably relished trying to hurt them back.Comedy Central s president sees the roast as prophetic of what s happening today: It is impossible to not see how absurd the whole thing is. If you go back and watch the roast, there re probably a lot of oddly prophetic things being said that are relevant today. But just the idea that someone who did a Comedy Central Roast [is] a major party [nominee] for president is pretty shocking. Especially when that person couldn t handle being criticized, teased, or otherwise treated as anything other than the god he thinks he is.Featured image by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images