A night of comedy where everyone sends you up for the long career you have had in whatever your field of entertainment is, i.e. take the Mick of you, first emerged in America, and then it went to Britain. This show, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, has the victim being Baywatch star, big-breasted pin up, actress and ultimate sex symbol, Pamela Anderson. The comedians and stars roasting her in the show included Sarah Silverman, Andy Dick, Hugh 'Hef' Hefner, Courtney Love, David Spade and ex-husband Tommy Lee, and look out for Christopher Lloyd, Dennis Rodman and Anna Nicole Smith. Anderson's comeback is subtle and with naivety, but good, and it is accompanied by her great see-through top (no bra). Pamela Anderson was number 93 on The 100 Greatest Pop Culture Icons, and she was number 22 on The 100 Greatest Sex Symbols, and Baywatch was number 17 on The 100 Greatest Sexy Moments. Very good!

I'm not a huge fan of this genre of humor, making fun of people, or in this case trying to make them look ridiculous, is not immediately the kind of humor that you have to be proud of, but since the person they make fun of is always present it changes everything. That person, in this case Pamela Anderson, is fine with the roast. I have to admire people that can take insults without getting up and start a fist fight. I, personally could not stay calm and would probably beat the crap out of every single one of them. Most of the comedians I don't even know, some are funny, others are not that funny, but overal I had good laughs. Most of the time it was a bit repetitive, laughing with Pamela's tits is just easy and a bit childish but it worked, laughing with her sex tape is okay, everybody saw it and honestly it's really not a big deal, I had much better sex than those scenes. But since it's one with Pamela Anderson, that was and still kinda is a sex symbol, it all looks hotter than it really is. Laughing about her vagina or huge batcave is funny but let's be honest most of the men here wouldn't say no if you would ask them if they would like to explore that cave. Pamela Anderson has a sense of humor as she takes all the jokes they made of her like she's used to take stuff without making a fuzz. Courtney Love though, that one I know, is not the most pleasant person to watch, just a vulgar junkie that acts like she's interesting but she's just the weakest link in this show. I guess for this genre of comedy this episode is one of the better ones.

For some reason no channel shows these Comedy Central Roasts - or any Roasts, for that matter - in the United Kingdom, which is a little surprising because all-out p*ss-taking as a form of expressing love and friendship is far more a British attribute than an American one, one would have thought. Except for one thing: in England we would happily take the mickey out of someone in public for faults of character, mannerisms, and the odd misjudgement, but in the American version there really are no holds barred. The most egregious public faux pas, the idiotic past relationships or marriages, the crimes committed - *nothing* is held to be out of bounds for the proper Roast. However, I can see that the Comedy Central Roasts generally concentrate on comedians, and after all, how much mischief can a comedian really get up to?

This one is different.

The Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a room full of people who have between them plumbed the depths of human behaviour in terms of drink, drugs and, most spectacularly, sex, and rip the sh*t out of each other for it. When you consider that this Roast is about Pamela Anderson, her ex-husband is Tommy Lee and her closest friend is Courtney Love, the sheer quantity of character flaws and devastating incidents that are up for grabs for all present to take fullest advantage of is almost beyond conception - from the quantity of flesh remaining in Pamela Anderson's silicon, to the amazement of Courtney Love's debut as a stand-up comedienne - not that she's funny, but that she's standing up. And the Big Three aren't the only ones to get the treatment. Eighty-two year old Bea Arthur got up on stage at one point and read a portion of Pamela's novel that involved, well, an act not legal in all 50 states, let's say, and for the remainder of the evening she had to sit and endure jokes about her having a penis.

Talk of the male organ does bring me to the down sides of the show - there were far too many references to Tommy Lee's apparently inordinately impressive equipment, and there certainly was a tendency on the part of all the Roasters to talk more about Lee and Love than about Anderson herself, certainly as the evening went on. And the other downside was that Pamela didn't do that great a job with her Riposte, which had some good lines that unfortunately died on the stage - although the audience and the participants were being so raucous that they simply may not have heard them properly.

Overall, a reasonably hilarious showcase of really, really offensive comedy. Watch it if you can, as long as you have a broad mind.