Jeff Ross

Insult comedy looks like the easiest job in the world until you have to do it in front of the person you are insulting. Jeff Ross has built an entire career on exactly that, at New York Friars Club dinners going back to the late nineties, across the Comedy Central roast series, and on the Netflix show Historical Roasts, and the nickname that stuck to him, Roastmaster General, was earned by volume and by nerve rather than handed over.

The craft is real and specific. A roast set is written cold, delivered once, and has to be funny to a room full of professionals while remaining survivable for the target sitting right there. Ross writes to the specific human in the chair instead of to a generic idea of celebrity, which is why he keeps getting invited back: the Hefner and Stiller dinners, the Shatner and Hasselhoff nights, the Franco and Bieber shows, and later the Tom Brady and Kevin Hart specials. In 2009 the Chicago Tribune called him the new millennium Don Rickles, which is a compliment and a job description at once.

Away from the podium he works as a comic actor in small doses, usually playing a loud man at the edge of frame or a version of himself: the wedding band leader in Along Came Polly, Hal Lane in The Wedding Ringer, a rabbi in Ricky Stanicky, an internet troll in The Emoji Movie. He also directs. His first feature was the 2006 documentary Patriot Act: A Jeffrey Ross Home Movie, and he has fronted his own series, The Burn.