Comedy Central’s Roast Of James Franco Apparently Featured Around 26 Gay Jokes

Sometime yesterday, while Miley Cyrus was winning the MTV Video Music Awards with the power of dance, on the other side of the vast United States James Franco was being roasted by his best friends, because roasting is a thing that losers still like to do to pretend they’re in the Rat Pack with John F. Kennedy or whatever.

While the show hasn’t gone to air yet (it’ll be airing on Comedy Central on September 2), select media were invited to the event and, as such, the reports are coming in thick and fast like Seth Rogen on a treadmill (that’s basically “a roast”, in case you were wondering).

As you can imagine, the jokes adhered to the usual Roast formula of immature obnoxiousness, but with an added twist: Ariane Lange of Buzzfeed “counted 26 gay jokes at Franco’s expense”, while James Hamblin of The Atlantic “only counted 25, but that’s because I was too busy having oral/anal sex with other men — just kidding. Did I do it right?”

According to Buzzfeed, Franco’s lifelong co-star Seth Rogen was the biggest offender, delivering eight gay jokes at Franco’s expense, although one was the somewhat innocuous “If there were two James Francos, they’d never stop butt-fucking each other…”, which is technically a gay joke, but also more of a dig at Franco’s wanky narcissism so could probably pass a police line-up.

Here’s a sample of how the others went:

1. “He’s a tough guy to pin down, although I’ve heard many guys have been able to do it.”
2. “Every man wants to be him, and he wants to be in every man.”
3. ” He told me he worked for 36 hours straight, which I don’t believe. The straight part.”
4. “[“He’s a lot like James Dean because] they both sucked some dicks and made three good movies.”
5. “He then went on to star in Milk, which is what he did to Sean Penn’s dick to get the role.”
6. “[127 Hours is based on the true story of when he spent] “five days with his arm inside the Rock. He goes by Dwayne Johnson.”
7. “[He was disappointed when he was cast in Lovelace as Hugh Hefner and] “not legendary blowjob artist, Linda Lovelace.”

Man, they are pretty lame (I guess the James Dean one’s okay?). Other pals like Andy Samberg, Sarah Silverman and Jonah Hill also hit the stage to deliver material generally centred on the recurring themes of jizz and Franco’s face, and the whole thing sounds like it was pretty, pretty, pretty fuckin’ terrible, or, you know, a typical Roast. (Although, we should commend this one directed at Franco by himself: “You say I sucked at the Oscars. I was a genius at the Oscars. That was experimental tuxedo sleep art.”)

The tone of the jokes aren’t exactly surprising: the gang’s films with Judd Apatow and his disciples have always featured similar off-coloured gags, like the awkward cell-room ‘sex’ scene in Pineapple Express and the recurring anal-rape jokes in This Is The End. You could make the argument that they’re lampooning their own homophobic tendencies in these films, but more often than not they just come off as antagonistic PC-baiting, cheap gags for provocation’s sake.

Thankfully, there was one shining light present to help the stupids recognise their stupidity: Aziz Ansari.

“Wow, so many gay jokes tonight about Franco,” said Ansari as he took to the dais. “Apparently if you’re clean, well-dressed, and mildly cultured, you’re supergay now. Is that why the rest of you guys are so aggressively fat and dirty?”, which, considering the context, was a well-played jab for all that is good in the world.

Well done, Aziz. Fine, we’ll buy your stupid $3.5 million romance book.