By Jeff Fleischer

On his birthday three years ago, Tony Caroselli’s friends decided to celebrate his turning a year older with a time-honored tradition—picking apart all his flaws, faults and foibles.

Caroselli, a writer and performer with the L.A. Connection Comedy Theater, was invited to a party at his friend Ben’s West Los Angeles apartment, completely unaware of the arranged roast. While the party wasn’t thrown in his honor, it didn’t seem unusual when a friend interrupted his cigarette break to invite him back inside for birthday cake. But once Caroselli came in, his friends sat him down on a couch, turned the living room into a makeshift dais and began, one at a time, to besmirch his good name.

Some had prepared speeches, while others coasted by on their improvisational skills, but they all had fun at his expense. "At the time, I was broke a lot, borrowing money a lot. That got a lot of attention," he says. "A lot of my talkativeness. Everybody kind of had little things they noticed." But despite all the nitpicking, Caroselli enjoyed being the guest of honor. "I was very emotionally affected by the roast—in the sense that I was extremely touched," he says. "If a stranger says it, they’re just trying to put you down. When it’s someone you like and love, you know that they still love you. And it’s nice to know they like you or love you in spite of all the things they can make fun of."

As the saying goes, people always hurt the ones they love, and roasts let them do so with a sense of humor. "You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others," French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in his 1900 essay "Laughter."

More recently, celebrity roasts have become popular television events. In 1973, Dean Martin created a revolving dais for his "Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts," which spent almost a decade on NBC mocking the likes of Jimmy Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Muhammad Ali. The Friars Club has hosted insult-comedy extravaganzas for almost a century, and recently televised roasts of celebrities such as Drew Carey, Hugh Hefner and Chevy Chase.