The sharpest darts are ready in an unexpected ring, a stage. Comedy Central has returned with the fourth season of Roast Battle, the original format of the channel produced in collaboration with El Terrat (The Mediapro Studio), where well-known faces of 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 judge of Roast Batlle, acknowledges, "I have seen people destroying themselves, skinning themselves in a way that... that you can't even imagine."
It is humor to the beast, humor in which "the lowest instincts and the worst insults emerge," says Eva Soriano, but they always seek a balance, that of a balance in which one side is the "bad host" and on the other the one that makes you laugh.
"The balance between attack and comedy has to be very well sought because when a joke is beast but not funny, you play it," explains the presenter. "Black humor is very difficult because as you don't make people laugh you give it to you. And there are times when they give it to you. Of course, as the program is edited we save some hosts, some very large, "he confesses about a fourth season in which more than ever humor, but barbaric humor, which offends the 'offended', is more present than ever.
In the program emerge the basest instincts, the worst insults, how energetic we are.
Eva Soriano, judge
The funny thing about Roast Battle is that this ring of humor does not climb the best comedians nor the most biting, characters are uploaded that probably if they faced jokes like those released in the program would rarely laugh. What would happen if Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo faced a humorous duel? First, it would be apotheosic if they accepted and, second, in the event that they did, perhaps, they would return to being flesh and blood because as Dani Mateo says, "humor liberates".
"I wish that all the battles were with humor and that all the wars were fought on a stage. Humor has always been necessary. Is humor more necessary than ever? There is no need to respond," he says.
And that is the objective of Roast Battle when on its stage it 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 of this season: Esperanza Aguirre against Pilar Rahola.
Dani Mateo, Eva Soriano and Juan Vaquero, judges of Roast Battle.COMEDY CENTRAL
"The battle between the two of them left me crazy," admits Dani Mateo who refuses to reveal a single detail of this lioness fight. However, the comedian and presenter can be excited: "The two came in political mode, but they started fencing and ended up doing Maximum Fighting Championship (UFC, for its acronym in English)."
It is the most tense battle of this entire season and all seasons of Roast Battle, and so far you can read. The quarrels of the past, which are not few, are resolved in a combat between the jurist and politician Esperanza Aguirre and the journalist, analyst and independentist Pilar Rahola. As if you put Santiago Abascal and Carles Puigdemont in the ring.
"It started out as a foil battle, but it lasted 10 seconds," Mateo continues. "When one gave him the first host, the other went to sack. They herd themselves in a way that they had to be separated. Of the four editions that we have with Roast Battle has been the heaviest battle, "he says excitedly.
Roast Battle is that, but taken to a humor to which we are no longer accustomed. It is like returning to the time of Tuesday and Thirteen, the humor that is now censored, to that humor of the 80s that marked a whole generation not only of spectators but above all of comedians. Comedians who now have to measure every word so as not to offend. "They are cycles", qualifies Dani Mateo, who is convinced that this "aggressive humor, with fang", which for so long prevailed in Spain, will return. "Look, I'm a kid from the 80s and that was Vietnam, so I'm not offended at all because I was raised by wolves," he says with his particular and incisive sense of humor, like that of that fang, the humorist.
What Dani Mateo refers to is that in Roast Battle he lets himself make humor and say what one thinks of without putting the gag ahead of time in case one, another or many are going to be offended and they will go for whoever does 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 on the street it's a crime, but in a ring it's normal and it's allowed.
Dani Mateo
The Roast Battle of Comedy Central, in addition to being a humor very present in the Anglo-Saxon world, are the jokes that one makes when nobody sees you, but in Roast Battle you do them so that they see you because it is the small agreement reached by those who 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 getting green with a person," adds Eva Soriano. "Imagine 15 minutes sticking hosts (dialectics) 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, "he argues.
Why? Because it is "therapeutic", Soriano and Mateo acknowledge. Laughter always has been. Margaret Stuber, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, did experiments in which groups of children put their hands in ice water. He found that if they were watching humorous videos they tolerated the pain better and ended up describing the experience as "less unpleasant."
"Lifehurts, it's very beastly and the blackest humor makes life. It's a little revenge to go to a theater and take everything that hurts you, everything that worries you, everything that makes you fall apart and laugh about 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
- Dani Mateo
- Esperanza Aguirre
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