Illo: Oliver Munday.

“Happy 9/11, everybody!”

It was actually September 9, nearly ten years after the attacks, and comedian Nick DiPaolo was on stage at the Gotham Comedy Club, where he’d been headlining, taking a chance that with a decade’s distance audiences might finally be ready to laugh—not about the thousands of dead, of course, but maybe about our shared anxieties and the collective experience of living with tragedy and fear.

Instantly, the house went cold, almost dead. Mr. DiPaolo, a 25-year standup veteran looked thrown for a moment. He paused, cocking his head and shooting the audience a look of disapproval, then he pushed on with his rant. “I want to call 311 and say, ‘I fucking saw something and so I’m saying something! I saw two fucking planes crash ten years ago! Do you remember that?’”

The audience erupted into an almost primal frenzy of cheers. For the remainder of the evening’s show, though, he’d steer clear of the topic. They say comedy equals tragedy plus time, but how much time exactly? When is it “too soon,” and when is it perhaps too late?

“Being offended has everything to do with what it is that the listeners cherish and value at a particular time,” Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College and the author of Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict, told The Observer. “At different times in your life you have a stronger or weaker commitment to a given idea or image and you do or don't want it messed around with in a joke. A tactful comedian knows that for any particular audience there are lines that should not be crossed.” For instance, he said, a dead-baby joke might land very differently for a group of teenagers than it would for the same audience ten years later, when they’re having children of their own. “A line has appeared, right?”

New York’s first responders and the construction crews on the Pile took incalculable risks in the hours and weeks after 9/11, but comics took some risks of their own, and while the results might not always have gone over well, they were generally part of an effort to help people process the experience, and the uncomfortable emotions it gave rise to. Gallows humor is a survival technique, after all. When a comedian makes a successful joke in response to a real tragedy, it can awaken an audience’s defiant spirit; when the joke bombs, it just pisses them off.

Contrary to Mel Brooks's famous line from The 2000 Year Old Man—"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”—according to a number of comics, the 9/11 jokes that really, well, killed in the early days tended to be those that targeted either the terrorists themselves or the comedians’ own failings and anxieties. Much was made of the response by The Onion—newly transplanted to New York from Wisconsin—which included such headlines as “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” David Letterman returned to the air six days after the attacks, with a heartfelt monologue that was perhaps most notable for its earnestness and lack of humor; his only jokes were about his hair, Paul’s lack of hair, and guest Regis Philbin: “Thank god Regis is here, so we have something to make fun of.”

In the city’s comedy clubs, stand-ups were free to take more chances. Comic Jim Norton recalled that after beginning gingerly, his bits became more aggressive. “As time went on, I began expanding, shitting on the hijackers, talking more in-depth about it,” he said. “I never once said anything against the people who were murdered. One woman in Long Island began heckling me and I started slamming her. I was getting more and more aggressive when someone at her table looked at me, kind of pleading, and made the ‘please don’t’ face.” Realizing the woman may have lost a relative in the attacks, he backed off.

Mr. DiPaolo recalled that he first tried addressing the attacks just two nights after 9/11 at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. “I went downstairs, and there were only eight or nine in the audience and I went on a rant about terrorists and they loved it! How could you not talk about it?” His jokes targeted Muslims—cathartic, perhaps, but maybe you had to be there? “The FBI has trouble penetrating these terrorist cells,” he said. “Bullshit. Move to my neighborhood, I've been buying fruit from the Taliban for four years.” Asked to recall a joke that bombed, he offered, “Every Mosque in this country should be on fire.”

Marc Maron recalled taking a similar approach. “I had a joke about Osama working at the deli down the street from me in Queens,” he told The Observer. “I got into a little trouble because my instinct wasn't immediately, ‘These are the guilty parties...let's start profiling.’ It became very heated.”

“There are no rules in comedy—period,” Mr. DiPaolo said. “If I died tonight, I hope my friends would be making jokes at my funeral tomorrow. That’s the beauty of comedy.”

According to Mr. Norton, no subject is completely taboo if it’s approached with the right intentions. “Americans have gotten so obsessively hypersensitive and they expect comedians to be the same way,” he said. “Every event, no matter how terrible, is fair game in comedy. None of us wanted to start making fun of people jumping from the buildings, the victims, shit like that. We made fun of our own reactions to the tragedy.”

Roseanne Barr has never been one to shy away from controversy, once posing in a photo spread for the alternative Jewish culture magazine Heeb wearing a Hitler moustache and a swastika and preparing to take a bite of what the caption referred to as “burnt Jew cookies.”

“Laughter is the greatest weapon there is,” she told The Observer. “To laugh things to scorn ends their effect.” However, the actress, who noted that she has plans to run for President in 2012—as the candidate for the “Green Tea Party”—added that she still draws the line at 9/11 jokes. “I think its too huge,” she said.

Comic Gilbert Gottfried made one of the more controversial 9/11 jokes two weeks after the attacks, during Comedy Central’s Roast of Hugh Hefner. The now infamous crack, which was cut from the show but appeared in the critically acclaimed documentary about taboo humor, The Aristocrats, was this: “‘I have a flight to California. But I can’t get a direct flight—they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building.’”

“There was still smoke in the air, and I wanted to be the first one to tell a poor taste joke and shock people out of their stupor,” Mr. Gottfried recalled.

Though the joke eventually gained Mr. Gottfried respectability, he said, the initial reaction was negative. “First there was a gasp and a lot of angry grumbling,” he recalled. “Some people booed, moaned and hissed, and one guy yelled out, ‘Too soon!’ I thought that he meant that I hadn’t taken enough time between the set up and the punch line! Someone tweeted at me the other day and wrote: ‘You make me laugh when I don’t want to,’ and that’s what I’ve felt for years I have felt I’ve done.”

Mr. Gottfried, who recently lost a gig as the Aflac duck after unleashing a series of questionable tweets about the Japanese tsunami, said that he wouldn’t repeat the 9/11 joke for an audience, but not for the reasons one might expect. “Now it’s past the shock point, and I like it when it’s shocking,” he said. “I always wanted to know where the person is in a big office who measures the amount of time and says, ‘Now you can say this!’” he added. “I feel like a person who wears a little ribbon on their lapel, or whatever is the latest thing, is no more sensitive or caring than somebody who cracks jokes about it.”

Joan Rivers delivered a 9/11 joke the same evening (it was also cut from the broadcast). The terrorists are going to win, she said, "...they’re gonna win because they’re ugly and horrible and they can slam into a building and they get 72 virgins. What’s a Jewish guy going to get? A 50-year-old woman who still won’t swallow."

Sarah Silverman deployed her signature brand of faux-naiveté, suggesting, “If American Airlines were smart, their slogan would be: ‘American Airlines first through the towers,’ because it is something in which they came first.” Louis C.K. opted to use the event to mock himself, theorizing, “You can figure out how bad a person you are by how soon after September 11th you masturbated. And for me it was between the two buildings going down. And you know, I had to do it. Otherwise they win.”

That night at the Comedy Cellar, with the fallen Trade Center still smouldering, Mr. Norton recalled, “A bunch of comics were hanging—myself, Patrice O'neal, Keith Robinson, Greg Giraldo, Chris Rock—and we started to talk to each other about thoughts we’d had about what we would have done if we were on one of the hijacked planes. We realized, like asses, that we all had these embarrassing fantasies of saving the day in that situation. So we went onstage and began talking about our individual fantasies, and the crowd loved it. They all related to it.”

Mr. Giraldo, who passed away this year, remembered the night fondly, turning it into a bit: “There wasn’t even electricity in some parts of the city, but we started doing shows because people seemed to want to come out; they seemed to want to laugh,” he would tell audiences, adding, “There were bachelorette parties, and I thought, Holy shit, I never thought that I would be proud to see a pack of drunken Jersey girls with condoms on their heads.

“I thought, Shit they are never going to be able to change the American way of life.”

"We're in this together," Mr. Edwards said, according to Variety.

"Stay strong, stay together," Mr. Edwards added according to the Associated Press. "It's about making sure these big corporations, these big media conglomerates don't step on your rights — that you have a real opportunity to share in the work that you've been producing."

Brian Stelter of the New York Times reported that the crowd of several hundred people was smaller than the organizers had anticipated. That said, the crowd did include such luminaries as David Chase, the creator of "The Sopranos" and comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

How did Mr. Edwards' populist rhetoric go over?

"The problem for Edwards is that when the 'working people' are stars of stage and screen--or snarky New York scribes--it's hard to make much of an impact," writes Andrew Romano on Newsweek.com. "I stood with two comedy writers, one from the Colbert Report and one from SNL. They weren't impressed. To put it mildly."

Afterwards, Mr. Edwards spoke with reporters.

"He used his post-rally avail to roll out his plan to more heavily regulate the credit card industry," reports Politico's Ben Smith. "One thing he didn't do -- as he hasn't lately -- was go out of his way to criticize Hillary Clinton. He hasn't backed off his earlier shots at her, but he seems content at the moment to let Clinton and Obama go at it."

Although, neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama were in attendance, both reportedly submitted letters in support of the guild's cause.

After arriving in Kuwait on the evening of May 15, the trio spent most of the following day visiting U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine encampments just outside the Iraqi border via Blackhawk helicopter. One source said that, at each stop, Mr. O'Brien told a few jokes and then spent the rest of his ground time meeting and taking photos with the troops, many of whom had just come from Baghdad. A Late Night source added that a majority of the soldiers-"a lot of them women"-were between the ages of 19 and 24 years old, which pretty much constitutes the core demographic of Mr. O'Brien's TV audience.

On May 18, Mr. O'Brien and his posse flew to a naval air base in Bahrain, where they donned flight helmets and survival vests and strapped themselves into what the Late Night source described as a "twin-engine turbo-prop" transport plane that made a wire landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz . Mr. O'Brien's cohort was documenting the trip-footage is slated to run on Late Night on May 22-and let's hope there's a shot of Mr. O'Brien in his military gear in case he decides to run for President one of these days.

At the end of the day, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Ross and Mr. Sweeney were then catapulted off the carrier and back into their civilian lives. They returned to New York on the afternoon of May 19.

U.S.O. spokesman John Hanson told The Transom that Mr. O'Brien met U.S.O. president Ned Powell earlier this year, at a party for NBC chairman and chief executive Bob Wright, and was asked by Mr. Powell: "All the other late-night guys have gone overseas"-David Letterman and Jay Leno have already done their patriotic bit-"when are you going?" Mr. Hanson continued, "And Mr. O'Brien said: 'Just tell me when and I'm there.' And sure enough, he went."

At press time, Late Night officials were taping and could not be reached for comment.

-Frank DiGiacomo

Triumph Poops On Everyone

While Conan O'Brien was recovering from his Kuwaiti jet lag, one of his show's regulars, Robert Smigel, a.k.a. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, was participating in another bit of morale-boosting entertainment for the troops on May 19. Mr. Smigel, along with Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried, Freddie Roman, Sandra Bernhard, Colin Quinn, Joy Behar, Kevin Meaney and other comics, took part in the ComedY Tonight! benefit for the 92nd Street Y, which was being taped and edited for broadcast on what a 92nd Street Y spokeswoman described as the U.S. Department of Defense's A.F.E. Spectrum Channel, which reaches American troops in 177 countries.

Given the American military's newfound sensitivity to foreign cultures-save for France-it will certainly be interesting to see what ends up on the finished tape, given that a number of the comics, on their way to punchlines about Al Qaeda and Iraq, had some fun with Allah and turbaned New York taxi drivers burning up their cell phones. ("You're plotting! You're plotting!" screamed Mario Cantone during his act.)

Then again, being that the live audience in the Y's Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street auditorium was largely Jewish-92nd Street Y president Matthew Bronfman was in the house, as was William Lauder, the Estée Lauder Company's chief operating officer, and Sally Klingenstein, executive director of the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation-many of the comics played to the house, even when it elicited some groans.

"It's for the troops-let's go right to the Jew material," said Gilbert Gottfried, who wore an untucked radioactive-pink button-down shirt, blue jeans and, for most of his act, held his head as if he was suffering from a blinding migraine. "'Cause you know, the troops really just love it. The troops are going, 'Oooh, read something from the Talmud! … Do that Menashe Skulnik imitation!'" (Skulnik was a Yiddish actor and comedian as well as the singer of "Cardova, the Bronx Casanova.")

After some jokes about O.J. Simpson -"I'm glad that O.J. Simpson has custody of the kids …. When O.J. tells you to do your homework, you do it"-and Charles Manson, Mr. Gottfried spent some quality time on Calista Flockhart.

"Sometimes I like to go clothes shopping with Calista Flockhart," he said. "Whenever she puts on a new outfit, she always goes, 'Does this dress make my spinal cord look big?'"

Mr. Gottfried said that Ms. Flockhart's weight worried him so much that "I took her to a doctor for a checkup. They don't actually X-ray her. A nurse stands behind her with a flashlight." The crowd loved that one. "I don't know what it's like to have sex with her," Mr. Gottfried continued. "I think it's like threading a needle."

And then he went for the finale.

"Just the other day, I went into a restaurant, I saw Calista Flockhart, and she was trying to get something out of her teeth," Mr. Gottfried said. "So I walked over to her. I said: 'Toothpick?' She said: 'Jew!'"

Ms. Silverman pushed the envelope even farther. "Nazis are a-holes-I'll say it right now," she said. "They're cute when they're little, but other than that …. Why can't they stay small?" And she provoked some real sounds of discomfort from the crowd when she told them: "If black people were in Germany during World War II, I believe the Holocaust would have never happened." She waited a beat, then said: "Or not to Jews."

Mr. Smigel-as-Triumph fashioned his segment as a kind of roast of the evening's performers. "There aren't enough inside-out baggies to pick up all the poop we heard tonight," he said from behind the little puppet theater that had been wheeled out on the stage.

Those comics who hadn't already left-and were brave enough to face their lumps-were called out to stand next to the mini-theater while Triumph dished out his shtick.

When Mr. Quinn ambled out, Triumph told the audience: "The last charity event that Colin took part in was when Sarah Silverman gave him a hand job-he complimented her Holocaust material."

To Mr. Gottfried: "Gilbert, I had a dream about you the other night. I was kissing you in my dream. I've got to remember not to sleep with my face so close to my ass."

To Mr. Roman: "The last time you said something funny, mankind had just domesticated dogs."

To SNL player Dean Edwards: There's a big buzz around Dean Edwards. Yes. The same kind of buzz flies make around my ass."

Ms. Behar wasn't around when Triumph got to her, but that didn't stop him from twitting her co-anchor on The View , Star Jones, who also wasn't there. "I tried to hump Star Jones' leg and I couldn't get around it," Triumph said. "They should fix her up with Al Roker. We could learn how dinosaurs made it."

Then, Mr. Smigel-as-Triumph said, he had some jokes "for the troops." One of them was from the U.S.O. show that he did on Late Night a while back, but it was still funny. "And how about that Army chow, huh, boys? Everyone complains about the Army chow," Triumph said. "Well, I ate the Army chow …. I ate the chow, and now she won't stop calling me!"

-F.D.

Absolut Anger

The Seagram Building's fourth-floor art gallery is closed, and the artwork that made the building as famous as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's design did will soon be replaced by Vivendi movie posters. The collection of photographs-by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt and Louis Faurer, among them-has been sold. So has Rothko's Brown and Blacks in Reds . The fate of Picasso's stage curtain, which hangs in the Four Seasons restaurant, is uncertain, but one thing is not: Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of former Seagram president Samuel Bronfman, is still seething.

"It's not the spoils of war, it's the disasters of war," said Ms. Lambert of the art collection she painstakingly compiled over the course of 50 years only to see it broken up and sold off as the latest chapter in Vivendi's star-crossed acquisition of the Seagram company.

Ms. Lambert's prized collection of photographs were sold by Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg on April 25 and 26, bringing in $2.87 million. And the Lichtensteins, Mirós and Rothkos that, along with the photos, once lined the halls and offices of the Seagram Building at 52nd Street and Park Avenue have, so far, brought in $9.9 million at Christie's. But Ms. Lambert called the proceeds-Vivendi reportedly expects to raise $15 million from the sale of the art-"peanuts" compared to more than $12 billion in debt that Vivendi Universal needs to pay off.

Now she has to look forward to the sale of the Seagram collections of antique drinking vessels, drawings by sculptors, which she successfully campaigned to be sold intact, and-that most striking of oddities-the 22-foot-high stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919 for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet Le Tricorne , which has hung in the hallway between the Four Seasons Grill Room and Pool Room since the building was finished. All are slated to be sold privately by Christie's.

Though Ms. Lambert's passion was the photograph collection, she said she was most worried about the fate of the Picasso curtain. She would like to see it stay in the Four Seasons. "I think Christie's is trying to honor that, but their responsibility is trying to make as much money as possible," Ms. Lambert said by phone from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she is president.

Besides, she said, the Picasso is "not a prize piece for any museum. Where would it have an effect? Who would want it other than somebody in a great huge mansion somewhere? They could say I have a Picasso, but it's really not one of the great works of art," she continued. "But the scale of it and the colors of it and the boldness of it are incredible."

Picasso historian John Richardson said that the curtain was "of considerable importance as one of the few Picasso theater curtains to have survived," but added that, because the curtain probably underwent heavy use in its original incarnation, it might have been repainted and refurbished by hands that did not belong to the artist. "I don't know that anybody has made an attempt to see how much is original," he said. Still, he said, "I think it's very regrettable it's being sold because it had become a major New York sight to be seen."

Manhattan art dealer Richard Feigen told The Transom that the reason the curtain was being sold privately as opposed to at auction was because it would be difficult to sell. "By no means would it be considered a significant work by Picasso," he said. "I wouldn't want to sell it."

Indeed, Four Seasons co-owner Julian Niccolini said he thought his restaurant was the best location for the work. Removing it, he said, would be "like taking the Statue of Liberty out of New York Harbor.

"We are very sad to get rid of it because it was part of the restaurant," he said. "I don't think there was any other place in America to have a piece like that."

Ms. Lambert said she had hoped that Vivendi Universal would donate it to a museum and even tried to explore the possibility of one of the Four Seasons regulars buying the curtain with the provision that it remain in place. (Christie's officials declined to place a price on it.) "I tried every avenue," she said. "I said I hoped maybe some individuals might be interested, maybe people who went to the restaurant a lot."

When asked whether the Bronfmans would consider buying the curtain, Ms. Lambert said, "I certainly couldn't afford it." And of her family, she replied: "I was told they couldn't afford it."

Ms. Lambert likened Vivendi's sale of the Seagram's collection to an "act of vandalism.

"Something's built up by an entity, by that society, and it's almost like having the vandals come in and destroy everything," Ms. Lambert said. She added that deposed Vivendi C.E.O. "Jean-Marie Messier was the person who put everybody into huge trouble because they were spending madly," she said. "I met him once-very rude man."

A Vivendi spokesperson said the art was put on the block because they were deemed to be assets that "were no longer of strategic value to the shareholders of the company."

But Christie's saw the other side of that coin. "Phyllis Lambert had an excellent eye," said a spokeswoman for the auction house. So far, the spokeswoman added, the collection's proceeds have already exceeded Christie's low estimate by almost $1 million. And another major painting, a Roberto Matta piece, is scheduled to go on the block at the May 28 Latin American sale.

While Ms. Lambert offered input to the auction houses, she said she didn't come to New York to witness the sales. "I was very unhappy about knowing they are going to do it even though I knew it for some time," she said.

But she did purchase one memento of the collection she'd spent half her life to assemble. It's a Walker Evans photograph of a man lying on his back with his legs in the air-as if he'd been upended.

-Alexandra Wolfe

Kudlow & Siegal

During the question-and-answer portion of the May 15 luncheon for CNBC talk-show hosts Lawrence Kudlow and James Cramer, Nation editor and Kudlow & Cramer contributor Katrina vanden Heuvel raised a couple of questions. One had to do with a recent appearance on the show by Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell. The other, which Ms. vanden Heuvel characterized as the "investigative question of the day," was:

What was Vanna White doing at the lunch?

The Wheel of Fortune letter-turner wasn't in the house (which happened to be the upstairs room at Le Cirque) when Ms. vanden Heuvel asked the question, but Ms. White-pert in a black sweater and rust pants-had circulated during the cocktail portion of the luncheon with her good friend Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris and Nikki.

Ms. White told The Transom that she was in town for the daytime Emmys and Ms. Hilton had brought her round, but word circulating through the party-via those close to Ms. Hilton-was that the recently divorced Ms. White was on the hunt for single men.

After 20 years on Wheel of Fortune , Ms. White can't be hurting for money. Still, she picked the right place to find a trophy husband. Among those in attendance were investment banker bachelor Ted Forstmann, single-but-attached Jets owner Woody Johnson and Optima Fund Management executive Chris Kennan. Indeed, at the end of luncheon, Mr. Kennan could be seen getting Ms. White's phone number off one of the event's junior publicists. Also in the crowd: Time Inc. editorial director John Huey, Blackstone Group chairman Pete Peterson, Cartier president Stanislaus de Quercize, Avenue Society editor Pamela Gross and her husband, Jimmy Finkelstein, and CNBC president Pamela Thomas-Graham.

After lunch, Mr. Cramer and Mr. Kudlow-who once worked in the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan-did a little stand-up. Mr. Cramer told the crowd that the autographed picture he was getting of him and Ms. White would mean much more to his daughters CeCe, 10, and Emma, 8, than the signed photo of President Bush he'd recently brought home. He then urged the journalists in the room "to return our producers'" calls. "We won't sandbag you," Mr. Cramer said.

It was around that time that Ms. vanden Heuvel asked the duo her questions. They didn't sandbag her, but they did duck her on the Vanna White issue.

Mr. Kudlow was a little more forthcoming on his prep-school prom experience with publicist Peggy Siegal, who just happened to have orchestrated the Le Cirque luncheon. "In those days, it was called the Englewood School," Mr. Kudlow said. "Now it's called the Dwight-Englewood School. Yeah, I had a puppy-love crush on Peggy Siegal. And I still have a puppy-love crush on Peggy Siegal. How's that?" Mr. Kudlow concluded, before turning to say goodbye to another lunch guest.

Well, it wasn't quite enough, but Ms. Siegal was happy to fill in the details. By her recollection, she was 17 and she wore a "strapless pink-and-white couture gown by Hannah Troy that my grandfather had gotten for me as a present. I was the only 17-year-old with a couture gown on," she said, adding that the prom dance took place at the Edgewood Country Club in Rivervale, N.J. Of Mr. Kudlow, Ms. Siegal remembered: "He looked like Gene Kelly. He was a very good dancer. So handsome. Very smooth." Come to think of it, Mr. Kudlow does kind of look like Jim Backus after a good sandblast.

Anyway, Ms. Siegal said that she and Mr. Kudlow have known each other "since we were kids. I used to ride my bike over to his school, which, at the time, was boys-only." Ms. Siegal said that she attended public school, Fort Lee High, "with the children of the real Sopranos." Ms. Siegal's public education continues to be a sore spot with her, in part because, she said, her mother sent her brother to private school. "Fifty years later, I'm still angry," she said.

That's not all the baggage she's retained from her high-school days. Ms. Siegal said that she was a Fort Lee High majorette. "And I can still fit into the uniform," she added with a smile.

-F.D.

Love a La Lane

"It was reported in The New York Times so it might be bullshit," cracked an extremely brunette Nathan Lane from the stage at the Hudson Theater, in reference to The Times ' recent scandale de Jayson Blair. Mr. Lane was hosting the Dramatist Guild's Annual Awards Gala on Monday, May 19, only a few blocks away from the Times building on West 44th Street, and he was within moments of introducing Times food writer Jonathan Reynolds, who is also a playwright and was receiving the Guild's Flora Roberts Award.

But apparently Mr. Lane felt no compunction about taking the Gray Lady's name in vain in his joke about a story they'd published about monkeys trying to write on computers. Mr. Lane had even less compunction about scolding his audience-which included composer Stephen Sondheim, playwrights Wendy Wasserstein, Alfred Uhry, Edward Albee, Richard Greenberg and Terrence McNally, composers and lyricists Alan Mencken, John Kander and Jerry Herman, and actors Marsha Mason, Tony Roberts and Mark Feuerstein-for their lack of enthusiasm.

"Fuck you," he said grumpily after one of his jokes provoked a tepid laugh. But a few awards later, Mr. Lane returned and explained "When I said 'Fuck you' earlier, that was my theatrically dysfunctional way of saying 'I love you.'"

-Rebecca Traister

The Transom Also Hears ….

Art dealer Tony Shafrazi kept light on his feet at the dinner that art collector Alberto Mugrabi threw for Art Review magazine's new publisher, Michelle Clark, at Mr. Chow on May 13. Revelers at the claustrophobically overcrowded soirée said that Mr. Shafrazi arrived with big-time art collectors Lawrence Graff and Benedict Taschen, but found that because many more people showed up than had been invited, he couldn't be seated with them. As a result, said one source, Mr. Shafrazi spent much of the evening shuttling between Mr. Taschen's and Mr. Graff's tables, so as not to let them fall prey to the legion of other dealers, whom included Larry Gagosian, Nick Aquavella, Stellan Holm and Jean-Pierre Lehmann. Mr. Mugrabi's girlfriend, socialite Rena Sindi, told The Transom that the party was a confluence of "his crowd and mine," which meant a mix of art and society types that included Aby Rosen and Samantha Boardman, Tory and Chris Burch, dealer Jeffrey Deitch, sugar-cane magnate Pepe Fanjul and his wife Lourdes, Art Review 's Emma Gray, Marc Glimcher and auction-house owner Simon de Pury, who according to one witness was doing a jig atop one of the tables.

-F.D.

York's Friars Club, stood before audience members in the Grand Ballroom of the

New York Hilton and asked them to familiarize themselves with the fire exits.

Then, because he'd said that "these are very different times for us all," he

attempted to answer a question that people had been asking him.

Mr. Roman's Vulcanesque eyes and brows scanned the audience

before him. The question sounded a little like something that would be asked at

Passover. "Why have a night like this in times like these?" Mr. Roman was

referring to the Friars Roast, the club's yearly ritual of profane humor and

insult that was about to get underway with Playboy

founder Hugh Hefner in the hot seat.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York, the Friars

organization and Comedy Central, the cable network that, for the last three

years, has taped and televised an expurgated version of the roast (this one

will debut on Nov. 4), had, after some debate, decided to go ahead with the

event. "It's time we get back to normal, like Mayor Giuliani and President Bush

have asked," Mr. Roman said. "And for the Friars, this is normal. Telling dirty

jokes, making fun of people. That's what we do, and we're proud to do it for

you," he said. "So you can get some laughter back in your life and into your

hearts."

While the crowd waited for the cameras to start rolling, Mr.

Roman eased into the task at hand.

"A couple married 48 years. Wife takes sick and passes away.

Funeral at the Riverside, 78th and Broadway," Mr. Roman said.  "After the service, the pall bearers pick up

the coffin. As they're leaving the building, the coffin hits the wall." From

inside the coffin, he said, the woman's voice could be heard. "They open the

coffin-it's a miracle," he said.

"She stays married for another two years. Gets sick, passes away

again. After the service, the pallbearers lift the coffin. As they start to

leave, the husband yells, 'Watch out for the wall!'"

The laughter sounded grateful. Mr. Roman got the high sign to

introduce Mr. Hefner. A small group of Playmates led the flesh magnate-who

looked frighteningly robust and wrinkle-free for a man in his 70's-to the big

red swivel chair on the stage.

Behind Mr. Hefner, stretching out like the wings of a B-52 bomber,

was the event's dais, a roster that only the Friars could put together: actors

Danny Aiello, Keith David, Vincent Pastore and The Sopranos ' Joe Pantoliano in a newsboy's cap;  MTV personality Carson Daly, looking lost;

mentalist the Amazing Kreskin, artist LeRoy Neiman, developer Donald Trump;

actress Diane Farr and Dr. Joyce Brothers; comedian Dick Capri, former kidnap

victim Patricia Hearst, onetime Playboy

pictorial subject Kylie Bax and makeup-less Kiss member Ace Frehley. 

Friar Club's Abbot Alan

King's eyes shone in the spotlight.

"The Friars have an age-old motto," Mr. King said. "'We only

roast the ones we love.' Tonight, we give lie to that bullshit."

His gaze shifted to Mr. Hefner, in mid-chuckle. "Not only don't I

love him, I never met this putz before in my life: Hugh Hefner, who likes to be

called Hef-but in Hebrew, spelled backwards, it's Feh!"

Our "leaders kept telling

us," Mr. King said, "we must get on with our lives, and laughter is a very

important part of our lives. And who better to laugh at than our guest of

honor," a man "who made jacking off a national pastime." A guy who "has smelt more

beaver than a furrier. A man who makes Donald Trump look like Elie Wiesel. A

man who thinks the early-bird special is eating pussy before 6 o'clock."

Mr. King stared down the crowd. "Who better?" he said.

Yes, who better to ease this

crowd back to its favorite bloodsport than Mr. Hefner, a man whose soul had

escaped his body decades ago via his vas deferens? The Friars weren't roasting

a man, they were roasting an abstraction: a square-jawed, silk-robed symbol of

American priapism, who, at 75, wanted us to believe that he was bedding down

nightly with more than a half-dozen human equivalents of Jessica Rabbit.

For a city that had crossed its pain threshold weeks ago, Mr.

Hefner was a fortunate choice. It's hard to eviscerate a man whose only innards

are a hyperdeveloped reproductive system, and who, up there onstage, looked as

burnished and ageless as a publicity still, emitting his affectless, Teflon

chuckle.

The table of Mr.

Hefner's alleged paramours and Playboy

Playmates seemed to have been placed strategically in front of the podium as a

symbol of what was at stake should any joker go too far. At the Comedy Central

after-party at Beacon restaurant, comedian Jeffrey Ross agreed that some

comedians had pulled their punch lines when it came to Mr. Hefner. "I'll tell

you why," said Mr. Ross, who was wearing a bow tie that Buddy Hackett had given

to him. "Because they're afraid they won't get invited to the mansion. They

were all backstage going, 'I know it's funny, but do you think this will piss

him off?'"

The roastmaster of the evening was Jimmy Kimmel, co-star of

Comedy Central's The Man Show . "I

could go on and on," said Mr. Kimmel, "but what could you say about Hef that

hasn't already been mumbled incoherently by a thousand young women with his

cock in their mouths? I've read just about every issue of Playboy since I was 15 years old," Mr. Kimmel continued. "Not once

did I ever see a Playmate say one of her turn-ons was fucking a 75-year-old

man."

Rob Schneider, whom Mr. Kimmel said "is so short he doesn't even

have to bend over to kiss Adam Sandler's ass," was the first roaster on the

podium. Mr. Schneider told the crowd, "We're here tonight to honor a man who

personifies why these terrorists hate us. If it were up to them, women couldn't

read, couldn't work, get fake tits, go to school, pose nude to help their

career. Hugh Hefner believes that women should be able to do all those

things-except read."

Mr. Schneider was the first comic of the night to approach the

topic that was foremost in everyone's thoughts. The laughter seemed hesitant

and restrained.

Jeffrey Ross went up to the podium. "Hasn't there been enough

bombing in this city?" he said into the microphone.

" Ooooooooooooh !" the

crowd erupted.

Mr. Ross was up next. The Buddy Hackett bow tie seemed to be

working. "My good friend Abe Vigoda's here," Mr. Ross said. "Last week, Abe

tried to enlist in Old Navy." Mr. Ross looked over at Mr. Vigoda. "Abe, enough

getting old. Just fuckin' die already, all right?"

Eventually, Mr. Ross got around to Mr. Hefner.

"Hef has fondled more playmates than Michael Jackson," Mr. Ross

said, which got him a big laugh. "Personally, I think it's awesome, awesome

that you sleep with seven women," he told Mr. Hefner, "because eight would be

ostentatious." And then the comic explained the real reason that so many women

were required: "You know, one to put it in, and the other six to move you

around."

Alan King's Last Fan

Sarah Silverman, in a stylish black number, replaced Mr. Ross at

the podium. "Jimmy Kimmel, everyone," she said to the crowd after Mr. Kimmel

introduced her. "He's fat and has no charisma. Watch your back, Danny Aiello!"

The crowd loved that one, and Ms. Silverman, who was the only

woman to roast Mr. Hefner, proceeded to lay waste to a few more of the men on

the dais. She told Mr. King that a nursing home in Florida had just called.

"The last person who thinks you're funny just died." And gazing at the

gray-bearded face of Dick Gregory, she said: "Is he the guy from the rice or

the cookies?

"Well, let's talk about the whores-the Bunnies," she continued.

"I think they should be role models in society-if only for the fact that they

wax their assholes." Later, The Transom asked Playmate Michelle Winchester what

her fellow Playmates had thought of that particular joke. She replied with a

smile: "Actually, that's true!"

Ice-T made his second speaking appearance at a Friars Roast. "I

just wanna rob all you white motherfuckers. And for some reason I don't, and it

fascinates you," he told the crowd, which gave him a healthy laugh just in case

he was serious. But there seemed to be some confusion in the crowd over whether

his line that Mr. Hefner's "dick is busier than an orthodontist in fucking

Japan right now" was actually funny.

The civil-rights activist and nutritionist Dick Gregory told a

couple of jokes. "Black folks," he said, "know this is a great nation" because

of the success of Michael Jackson. "Where else can a poor black boy be born in

utter poverty in Gary, Ind., and end up being a rich white man?" Mr. Gregory

said.

But Mr. Gregory had come to praise Mr. Hefner, not roast him. He

cited Mr. Hefner's courage for hiring black entertainers to work the Playboy

Club when no one else would. And then he delivered an inspirational speech

about New York and the United States.

"Fear and God do not occupy the same space," Mr. Gregory told the

crowd. "If you stop and think about what makes America great, it's not soldiers

… it's the firemen that left home this morning and intended to come back

tonight and ran into a building when everybody else was running out."

The crowd gave Mr. Gregory a

standing ovation, but the quick-thinking Mr. Kimmel steered the event back to

its profane moorings. "So anyway," he said, "I was reading your magazine the

other day," and he described what he was doing while he was reading. The crowd

exploded with laughter. "Someone forgot to tell Dick this was a roast," Mr.

Kimmel said, adding: "Boy, does that make me feel like a piece of shit."

Ice-T Did My Act

Gilbert Gottfried was the last man up to the podium. In his $11

gray shawl-collar tuxedo jacket with tails, black bow tie and Caesar haircut,

Mr. Gottfried looked like he had just come from band practice.

Mr. Gottfried grasped the podium with both hands and, squinting

out at the audience, he began the screeching parrot-like delivery that is his

trademark.

"Ice-T did my whole act," he said. "So I'll do it anyway: I'm

going to follow you white motherfuckers home and rape you fucking white

bitches." Mr. Gottfried paused while the crowd convulsed. "You see, it's such a

strong bit it still works," he said.   

"Dick Gregory did the rest of my act," he continued. "I want to

say-a lot of you young people don't know, but years ago, Jews were not allowed

in comedy!" 

Then Mr. Gottfried started in on Mr. Hefner. "Hugh Hefner doesn't

need Viagra. He needs cement! He needs to take ice-cream sticks and tape it

around his dick and use it as a splint!" Mr. Gottfried screamed. "But in all

fairness to Hefner, he really had to fight for free speech, so we could say

things we couldn't say before. Like: 'Die, you senile old bastard! Die! '"

Mr. Gottfried was killing. It

was time to push the envelope.

"Tonight I'll be using my Muslim name, Hasn't Been Laid," he

said. This got a big laugh. Then Mr. Gottfried began a routine that had worked

extremely well for him at the Richard Belzer roast.

"A woman is on her deathbed," Mr. Gottfried said. "The husband is

sitting at the corner of the bed …. [H]er hair's all dried out. Her skin's all

white. All of a sudden, she goes, 'Please, honey …. '" Mr. Gottfried described

the woman's verboten sexual

request. 

The comedian paused. Some of the audience members were looking

around.

"This is a clean one," he said. The husband complies and, Mr.

Gott-fried said, "the color returns to her skin; her hair looks healthy. She

jumps up in bed. She's sexier and healthier than she ever was before. She looks

down. Her husband's sitting at the corner of the bed, crying. She goes, 'What's

the matter?'"

Mr. Gottfried waited a millisecond. "He goes, 'I could have saved

my father!'"

The laughter came in gasps. There were gurgling sounds in the air

and people hung doubled over, sucking air through hoarse throats.

The man in the gray tuxedo jacket looked out over the crowd. "I

have a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight," Mr. Gottfried said.

"They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."

There was a silence. Then hissing and hooting flooded forward.

"Too soon," a man could be heard saying in the back of the ballroom.

When the booing started, Mr. Gottfried responded: "Awwwwwww, what

the fuck do you care?" Silence fell once more.

Mr. Gottfried had his answer. Up on the podium, he began making

strange movements with his arms, as if he was working some sort of invisible

machine that could take him back in time to the moment right before he had

pushed too far. Seconds passed.

"O.K.," he continued. His voice was not so loud. 

"A man-a talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks

in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, 'What

kind of an act do you do?'

"At the father's signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes

en masse. "The father starts fucking his wife," he said. "The wife starts

jerking off the son. The son starts going down on the sister. The sister starts

fingering the dog's asshole." Mr. Gottfried's voice was growing stronger. "Then

the son starts blowing his father."

The Hilton's ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden

exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and

recognition. Some of the men had dropped to all fours.

Mr. Gottfried was beaming.

"Want me to start at the beginning?" he asked.

He kept going, turning the joke into an extended bacchanal of

bodily fluids, excrement, bestiality and sexual deviance. Mr. Gottfried plumbed

the darkest crevices he could find. He riffed and riffed until people in the

audience were coughing and sputtering and sucking in great big gulps of air.

Tears ran throughout the Hilton ballroom, as if Mr. Gottfried had performed a

collective tracheotomy on the audience, delivering oxygen and laughter past the

grief and ash that had blocked their passageways. 

Then he brought it home.

"The talent agent says, 'Well, that's an interesting act. What do

you call yourselves?'"

Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. "And they go, 'The

Aristocrats!'"

There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.

Mr. Gottfried had gone to "The Aristocrats," the comedy

equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie

Hall on Sunday. "The Aristocrats" is one of the definitive inside jokes among

comedians. It is so definitive that comicPaul Provenza and performance artist

Penn Jillette are making a digital documentary about the joke. "Every comic

makes it their own," Mr. Provenza said. "The set-up is the same and the punch

line is the same," but the comic puts his or her "own stamp" on the material in

between.

Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the

crowd to another place.

A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment.

"Forgive me," he said. "I'm just still a little touched by that

asshole Gottfried."

New York Hilton and asked them to familiarize themselves with the fire exits.

Then, because he'd said that "these are very different times for us all," he

attempted to answer a question that people had been asking him.

Mr. Roman's Vulcanesque eyes and brows scanned the audience

before him. The question sounded a little like something that would be asked at

Passover. "Why have a night like this in times like these?" Mr. Roman was

referring to the Friars Roast, the club's yearly ritual of profane humor and

insult that was about to get underway with Playboy

founder Hugh Hefner in the hot seat.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York, the Friars

organization and Comedy Central, the cable network that, for the last three

years, has taped and televised an expurgated version of the roast (this one

will debut on Nov. 4), had, after some debate, decided to go ahead with the

event. "It's time we get back to normal, like Mayor Giuliani and President Bush

have asked," Mr. Roman said. "And for the Friars, this is normal. Telling dirty

jokes, making fun of people. That's what we do, and we're proud to do it for

you," he said. "So you can get some laughter back in your life and into your

hearts."

While the crowd waited for the cameras to start rolling, Mr.

Roman eased into the task at hand.

"A couple married 48 years. Wife takes sick and passes away.

Funeral at the Riverside, 78th and Broadway," Mr. Roman said.  "After the service, the pall bearers pick up

the coffin. As they're leaving the building, the coffin hits the wall." From

inside the coffin, he said, the woman's voice could be heard. "They open the

coffin-it's a miracle," he said.

"She stays married for another two years. Gets sick, passes away

again. After the service, the pallbearers lift the coffin. As they start to

leave, the husband yells, 'Watch out for the wall!'"

The laughter sounded grateful. Mr. Roman got the high sign to

introduce Mr. Hefner. A small group of Playmates led the flesh magnate-who

looked frighteningly robust and wrinkle-free for a man in his 70's-to the big

red swivel chair on the stage.

Behind Mr. Hefner, stretching out like the wings of a B-52 bomber,

was the event's dais, a roster that only the Friars could put together: actors

Danny Aiello, Keith David, Vincent Pastore and The Sopranos ' Joe Pantoliano in a newsboy's cap; MTV personality Carson Daly, looking lost;

mentalist the Amazing Kreskin, artist LeRoy Neiman, developer Donald Trump;

actress Diane Farr and Dr. Joyce Brothers; comedian Dick Capri, former kidnap

victim Patricia Hearst, onetime Playboy

pictorial subject Kylie Bax and makeup-less Kiss member Ace Frehley.

Friar Club's Abbot Alan

King's eyes shone in the spotlight.

"The Friars have an age-old motto," Mr. King said. "'We only

roast the ones we love.' Tonight, we give lie to that bullshit."

His gaze shifted to Mr. Hefner, in mid-chuckle. "Not only don't I

love him, I never met this putz before in my life: Hugh Hefner, who likes to be

called Hef-but in Hebrew, spelled backwards, it's Feh!"

Our "leaders kept telling

us," Mr. King said, "we must get on with our lives, and laughter is a very

important part of our lives. And who better to laugh at than our guest of

honor," a man "who made jacking off a national pastime." A guy who "has smelt more

beaver than a furrier. A man who makes Donald Trump look like Elie Wiesel. A

man who thinks the early-bird special is eating pussy before 6 o'clock."

Mr. King stared down the crowd. "Who better?" he said.

Yes, who better to ease this

crowd back to its favorite bloodsport than Mr. Hefner, a man whose soul had

escaped his body decades ago via his vas deferens? The Friars weren't roasting

a man, they were roasting an abstraction: a square-jawed, silk-robed symbol of

American priapism, who, at 75, wanted us to believe that he was bedding down

nightly with more than a half-dozen human equivalents of Jessica Rabbit.

For a city that had crossed its pain threshold weeks ago, Mr.

Hefner was a fortunate choice. It's hard to eviscerate a man whose only innards

are a hyperdeveloped reproductive system, and who, up there onstage, looked as

burnished and ageless as a publicity still, emitting his affectless, Teflon

chuckle.

The table of Mr.

Hefner's alleged paramours and Playboy

Playmates seemed to have been placed strategically in front of the podium as a

symbol of what was at stake should any joker go too far. At the Comedy Central

after-party at Beacon restaurant, comedian Jeffrey Ross agreed that some

comedians had pulled their punch lines when it came to Mr. Hefner. "I'll tell

you why," said Mr. Ross, who was wearing a bow tie that Buddy Hackett had given

to him. "Because they're afraid they won't get invited to the mansion. They

were all backstage going, 'I know it's funny, but do you think this will piss

him off?'"

The roastmaster of the evening was Jimmy Kimmel, co-star of

Comedy Central's The Man Show . "I

could go on and on," said Mr. Kimmel, "but what could you say about Hef that

hasn't already been mumbled incoherently by a thousand young women with his

cock in their mouths? I've read just about every issue of Playboy since I was 15 years old," Mr. Kimmel continued. "Not once

did I ever see a Playmate say one of her turn-ons was fucking a 75-year-old

man."

Rob Schneider, whom Mr. Kimmel said "is so short he doesn't even

have to bend over to kiss Adam Sandler's ass," was the first roaster on the

podium. Mr. Schneider told the crowd, "We're here tonight to honor a man who

personifies why these terrorists hate us. If it were up to them, women couldn't

read, couldn't work, get fake tits, go to school, pose nude to help their

career. Hugh Hefner believes that women should be able to do all those

things-except read."

Mr. Schneider was the first comic of the night to approach the

topic that was foremost in everyone's thoughts. The laughter seemed hesitant

and restrained.

Jeffrey Ross went up to the podium. "Hasn't there been enough

bombing in this city?" he said into the microphone.

" Ooooooooooooh !" the

crowd erupted.

Mr. Ross was up next. The Buddy Hackett bow tie seemed to be

working. "My good friend Abe Vigoda's here," Mr. Ross said. "Last week, Abe

tried to enlist in Old Navy." Mr. Ross looked over at Mr. Vigoda. "Abe, enough

getting old. Just fuckin' die already, all right?"

Eventually, Mr. Ross got around to Mr. Hefner.

"Hef has fondled more playmates than Michael Jackson," Mr. Ross

said, which got him a big laugh. "Personally, I think it's awesome, awesome

that you sleep with seven women," he told Mr. Hefner, "because eight would be

ostentatious." And then the comic explained the real reason that so many women

were required: "You know, one to put it in, and the other six to move you

around."

Alan King's Last Fan

Sarah Silverman, in a stylish black number, replaced Mr. Ross at

the podium. "Jimmy Kimmel, everyone," she said to the crowd after Mr. Kimmel

introduced her. "He's fat and has no charisma. Watch your back, Danny Aiello!"

The crowd loved that one, and Ms. Silverman, who was the only

woman to roast Mr. Hefner, proceeded to lay waste to a few more of the men on

the dais. She told Mr. King that a nursing home in Florida had just called.

"The last person who thinks you're funny just died." And gazing at the

gray-bearded face of Dick Gregory, she said: "Is he the guy from the rice or

the cookies?

"Well, let's talk about the whores-the Bunnies," she continued.

"I think they should be role models in society-if only for the fact that they

wax their assholes." Later, The Transom asked Playmate Michelle Winchester what

her fellow Playmates had thought of that particular joke. She replied with a

smile: "Actually, that's true!"

Ice-T made his second speaking appearance at a Friars Roast. "I

just wanna rob all you white motherfuckers. And for some reason I don't, and it

fascinates you," he told the crowd, which gave him a healthy laugh just in case

he was serious. But there seemed to be some confusion in the crowd over whether

his line that Mr. Hefner's "dick is busier than an orthodontist in fucking

Japan right now" was actually funny.

The civil-rights activist and nutritionist Dick Gregory told a

couple of jokes. "Black folks," he said, "know this is a great nation" because

of the success of Michael Jackson. "Where else can a poor black boy be born in

utter poverty in Gary, Ind., and end up being a rich white man?" Mr. Gregory

said.

But Mr. Gregory had come to praise Mr. Hefner, not roast him. He

cited Mr. Hefner's courage for hiring black entertainers to work the Playboy

Club when no one else would. And then he delivered an inspirational speech

about New York and the United States.

"Fear and God do not occupy the same space," Mr. Gregory told the

crowd. "If you stop and think about what makes America great, it's not soldiers

… it's the firemen that left home this morning and intended to come back

tonight and ran into a building when everybody else was running out."

The crowd gave Mr. Gregory a

standing ovation, but the quick-thinking Mr. Kimmel steered the event back to

its profane moorings. "So anyway," he said, "I was reading your magazine the

other day," and he described what he was doing while he was reading. The crowd

exploded with laughter. "Someone forgot to tell Dick this was a roast," Mr.

Kimmel said, adding: "Boy, does that make me feel like a piece of shit."

Ice-T Did My Act

Gilbert Gottfried was the last man up to the podium. In his $11

gray shawl-collar tuxedo jacket with tails, black bow tie and Caesar haircut,

Mr. Gottfried looked like he had just come from band practice.

Mr. Gottfried grasped the podium with both hands and, squinting

out at the audience, he began the screeching parrot-like delivery that is his

trademark.

"Ice-T did my whole act," he said. "So I'll do it anyway: I'm

going to follow you white motherfuckers home and rape you fucking white

bitches." Mr. Gottfried paused while the crowd convulsed. "You see, it's such a

strong bit it still works," he said.   

"Dick Gregory did the rest of my act," he continued. "I want to

say-a lot of you young people don't know, but years ago, Jews were not allowed

in comedy!" 

Then Mr. Gottfried started in on Mr. Hefner. "Hugh Hefner doesn't

need Viagra. He needs cement! He needs to take ice-cream sticks and tape it

around his dick and use it as a splint!" Mr. Gottfried screamed. "But in all

fairness to Hefner, he really had to fight for free speech, so we could say

things we couldn't say before. Like: 'Die, you senile old bastard! Die! '"

Mr. Gottfried was killing. It

was time to push the envelope.

"Tonight I'll be using my Muslim name, Hasn't Been Laid," he

said. This got a big laugh. Then Mr. Gottfried began a routine that had worked

extremely well for him at the Richard Belzer roast.

"A woman is on her deathbed," Mr. Gottfried said. "The husband is

sitting at the corner of the bed …. [H]er hair's all dried out. Her skin's all

white. All of a sudden, she goes, 'Please, honey …. '" Mr. Gottfried described

the woman's verboten sexual

request. 

The comedian paused. Some of the audience members were looking

around.

"This is a clean one," he said. The husband complies and, Mr.

Gott-fried said, "the color returns to her skin; her hair looks healthy. She

jumps up in bed. She's sexier and healthier than she ever was before. She looks

down. Her husband's sitting at the corner of the bed, crying. She goes, 'What's

the matter?'"

Mr. Gottfried waited a millisecond. "He goes, 'I could have saved

my father!'"

The laughter came in gasps. There were gurgling sounds in the air

and people hung doubled over, sucking air through hoarse throats.

The man in the gray tuxedo jacket looked out over the crowd. "I

have a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight," Mr. Gottfried said.

"They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."

There was a silence. Then hissing and hooting flooded forward.

"Too soon," a man could be heard saying in the back of the ballroom.

When the booing started, Mr. Gottfried responded: "Awwwwwww, what

the fuck do you care?" Silence fell once more.

Mr. Gottfried had his answer. Up on the podium, he began making

strange movements with his arms, as if he was working some sort of invisible

machine that could take him back in time to the moment right before he had

pushed too far. Seconds passed.

"O.K.," he continued. His voice was not so loud.

"A man-a talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks

in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, 'What

kind of an act do you do?'

"At the father's signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes

en masse. "The father starts fucking his wife," he said. "The wife starts

jerking off the son. The son starts going down on the sister. The sister starts

fingering the dog's asshole." Mr. Gottfried's voice was growing stronger. "Then

the son starts blowing his father."

The Hilton's ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden

exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and

recognition. Some of the men had dropped to all fours.

Mr. Gottfried was beaming.

"Want me to start at the beginning?" he asked.

He kept going, turning the joke into an extended bacchanal of

bodily fluids, excrement, bestiality and sexual deviance. Mr. Gottfried plumbed

the darkest crevices he could find. He riffed and riffed until people in the

audience were coughing and sputtering and sucking in great big gulps of air.

Tears ran throughout the Hilton ballroom, as if Mr. Gottfried had performed a

collective tracheotomy on the audience, delivering oxygen and laughter past the

grief and ash that had blocked their passageways.

Then he brought it home.

"The talent agent says, 'Well, that's an interesting act. What do

you call yourselves?'"

Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. "And they go, 'The

Aristocrats!'"

There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.

Mr. Gottfried had gone to "The Aristocrats," the comedy

equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie

Hall on Sunday. "The Aristocrats" is one of the definitive inside jokes among

comedians. It is so definitive that comicPaul Provenza and performance artist

Penn Jillette are making a digital documentary about the joke. "Every comic

makes it their own," Mr. Provenza said. "The set-up is the same and the punch

line is the same," but the comic puts his or her "own stamp" on the material in

between.

Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the

crowd to another place.

A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment.

"Forgive me," he said. "I'm just still a little touched by that

asshole Gottfried."

Applause and a feral roar came back to Mr. Roman. The crowd sounded ready and willing for what was to transpire next: the public humiliation of comedian-actor Richard Belzer. But Mr. Roman seemed determined to leave no doubt about what was expected of the uninitiated and what they, in turn, should expect.

"To begin with, there should be no recording devices here. You're part of something very private and very special," Mr. Roman said. "We're counting on you to keep our secrets." And "anyone with rosary beads or muttering the Torah, I'd consider calling it a night." As for "the prudes in the audience," he added, "I'm giving you fair warning: You'll be plotzing–but you'll also be laughing your ass off." The crowd bellowed with anticipation. "And if you love Richard Belzer and have a soft spot in your heart for him, we're about to change all that."

The comment seemed more like a come-on than a warning. For some time now, the Friars have slowly been letting the secrets of their ancient tradition leak into the civilized world. What was once the province of shtarker male comedians is now a coed event that, for the last three years, has been cablecast, in edited form, on Comedy Central–and will be again, when Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is roasted on Sept. 29.

And on June 9, the Friars took things to another level. Even before the Comedy Central specials began, comedy fans have been praying that the organization would find a way to market unexpurgated versions of its hallowed roasts (pay-per-view is often mentioned), and the Town Hall event–New Yorkers are fans of comedy and evisceration, after all–seemed a safe step in that direction.

But those who came thinking they were about to see a comic bloodletting of the first order would have to think again. There were certainly plenty of choice comic moments at Town Hall, but there were also unfunny stand-ups ( Bill Maher! ) and cheesy showbiz-bigshot cameos ( Barry Levinson! ) in between. It was like going to the theater to see Braveheart and finding out that it had been chopped up and spliced together with What Women Want .

Fortunately, the thread tying together these two disparate halves of the Town Hall event was Roastmaster Paul Shaffer. Contrary to the vanilla ice-cream suit and white-framed glasses that he wore for the evening, Mr. Shaffer showed a darker side of himself rarely on view as the leader of David Letterman's Late Show band.

Usually it's the Friars Abbot, Alan King, who sets the filthy tone of the evening, but this time around, the usually laser-sharp Mr. King seemed unfocused. After getting a nice laugh by reducing Mr. Belzer's résumé to a single line–"He used to be funny, and he's been on a cop show for nine years"–Mr. King then proceeded to walk the audience, at length, through his own autobiography–from Major Bowes to the bar mitzvah in Teaneck, N.J., that he suddenly left to play.

Although, at its best, a roast is the confrontation of mortality through comedy–the roast victim's every shortcoming and failure is laid still quivering on the stage–Mr. King seemed preoccupied. "I'm aging. It's not good. It's not easy," he said at one point to the receptive but mystified crowd, before recalling what his mentor George Burns had said on his 90th birthday about his sex life. "It's like shooting pool with a rope," Mr. Burns had said–and that , Mr. King continued after the laughter died down and before leaving the stage, was "how I feel about our guest of honor."

"He's a legend. He's a survivor, really, more than a legend," Mr. Shaffer said of Mr. King once he had been given the floor. "The man survived the advent of the talkies, the death of radio, 93 appearances on the Sullivan show" and, he added, "third-degree burns on his hand from jerking off Topo Gigio."

Mr. Shaffer then said that the last time he'd been in Town Hall, "I was eating [the folk singer] Odetta." When the half of the audience that got the joke roared its approval, Mr. Shaffer, reacting with a kind of mock surprise at his own insouciance, told them: "I don't usually work blue. Uh, but tonight, at an event like this, it's compulsory. This is what I was told: You gotta work blue. It behooves me to do that. So I want to tell you–fair warning, especially the ladies–the nicest word you're likely to hear tonight is 'cunt.'"

The formalities out of the way, Mr. Shaffer got down to the task of roasting his longtime friend. "Richard Belzer is a man who made us laugh so much and then stopped around 1991," he said, noting that Mr. Belzer's last HBO comedy special had been about one of the roastee's favorite subjects: conspiracy theories. So Mr. Shaffer proposed a "Warren Commission to look into exactly how you died."

From there, Mr. Shaffer touched on what would be the major comic themes of the evening: Mr. Belzer's onetime dalliance with drugs, the testicle he lost to cancer, his tendency to recycle bits, his soft-core porn actress wife, Harley McBride and, of course, plenty of sexual deviance.

"I met him 27 years ago. That was when he still considered heroin one of the four basic food groups," Mr. Shaffer said, tracing Mr. Belzer's history to his current role as Detective Munch on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit .

"Detective Munch. Love that character," Mr. Shaffer said, sounding a bit like Sammy Davis Jr. and adding that, coincidentally, "Detective Munch is Ellen DeGeneres' party name."

"What makes a man the Belz?" Mr. Shaffer asked. "A lot of people know that his lovely wife Harley has made a few soft-core adult films many years ago," he said. How are these films different from hard-core porn? "In the soft-core," he said, "it just looks like the chick is sucking a black guy's ass."

But Mr. Shaffer added, "that's not what makes a man the Belz."

Next, Mr. Shaffer recalled the time Mr. Belzer landed the role of "Seth, the gay stage manager," in the Al Pacino film Author Author . "To prepare for the role," Mr. Belzer, he continued, "went on a strict cock diet for two months. But that's not what makes a man the Belz. I think it's staying on that diet for six months after the film– that ," the roastmaster said with utter conviction, "is what makes a man the Belz."

Anyone who watched Mr. Belzer during Mr. Shaffer's riff, and for the rest of the roast, would have been hard-pressed to think of a better candidate for the first man roasted in public. Though he was dressed in his trademark black and his eyes were masked by his omnipresent sunglasses, Mr. Belzer's face came alive with sheer joy every time a good punch line was launched his way. He looked like he was thoroughly enjoying his vivisection, and this was helped the crowd enjoy themselves. Then again, Mr. Belzer was surrounded by a contingent of friends on the dais that included actors Ice T, Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Walken, director Barry Levinson, Oz creator Tom Fontana, comic and author Al Franken, Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher and Catch a Rising Star founder Rick Newman.

Before turning to the live participants, Mr. Shaffer introduced a series of videotapes sent by various celebrities, including Jay Leno, Regis Philbin, Billy Crystal and The Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart. "What a tremendous honor–you're getting roasted at the Toyota Comedy Festival," Mr. Stewart said in his. "Boy, who knows more about comedy than the Japanese auto-makers?" "You had two series on NBC at the same time, which leads me to think one thing," Mr. Crystal said: "You have pictures of Bob Wright fucking a duck." Then Mr. Crystal held up a Zip-Loc bag that contained what looked like an orb of uncooked chicken. Mr. Crystal reported that he was happy to have retrieved Mr. Belzer's lost testicle. "I found it in Rick Newman's ass," he said.

"It was great of everybody to send those tapes," Mr. Shaffer said after the lights came up. "Jay Leno would have liked to have been here, but he's restoring an old rod. Enough about Regis' cock."

It was the last good laugh for a nice stretch. Robert Klein got up and did a bit in which the subtitle of Mr. Belzer's series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , became progressively more shabby. Then he inexplicably started thanking people on the dais until Mr. Roman yelled out: "I had to shave again!"

"You did a fair amount, too, you sonuvabitch," Mr. Klein replied.

Next up was Mr. Fontana, the creator of HBO's prison series, Oz . Mr. Fontana's series inspired a lot of anal-rape jokes over the course of the evening, but once more, the best part of his routine was Mr. Shaffer's introduction. "You know who should be on Oz ? Robert Downey Jr.!" Mr. Shaffer said, introducing Mr. Fontana. "You think he walks like Chaplin now!"

During Mr. Klein's lengthy set, Politically Incorrect' s Mr. Maher seemed to be squirming with boredom, and so when he took the podium, there was the sense that he would fire things up. "Some of the people up here so far really don't know you that well, and I think that's been reflected in their mediocre material," Mr. Maher said, adding that his soon-to-be-deployed material "may not be funny, but it's real. And it's very personal." Well, Mr. Maher was right. He was real, personal and not funny. Mr. Belzer, he said, "had a rough childhood. When his mother threw scraps on the table, the dog had to signal for a fair catch. And then his father killed himself."

"Whew!" someone could be heard saying in the audience. Indeed, one person who repaired to the Friars Club after the roast overheard Mr. Belzer saying that the remark about his father was the only joke of the evening that pissed him off. But at the end of the evening, Mr. Belzer told the crowd: "Bill's a great guy. The only time he has a funny bone in his body is when I fuck him in the ass."

Barry Levinson followed. He wasn't funny, either, but he got some nice laughs, for which he seemed grateful and relieved.

And then things got much better.

After Mr. Shaffer introduced comedian Jeffrey Ross as "the new kiss-ass king of the Friars," Mr. Ross thanked him for the nice intro. Then he said that Mr. Shaffer looked like "Doc Severinsen fucked a turtle."

Then Mr. Ross turned on the rest of the roasters, setting a precedent that would be repeated again and again. "This dais is lamer than Giuliani's cock," he said. Mr. Belzer looked "like Johnny Cash fucked a pockmark."

"When I see Richard Belzer, at least I think of Homicide . When I see Al Franken, I think of suicide," Mr. Ross continued. "Actually, all kidding aside, Al Franken gave me a copy of his new book, and I'm grateful because now I have something to give my maid's husband for Kwanzaa."

And spotting Mr. Roman, Mr. Ross said: "Freddie! Timothy McVeigh has a brighter future than you."

After a brief musical interlude by Jerry Orbach, in which he rhymed "Belzer" with "seltzer" to the tune of "Mona Lisa," Mr. Shaffer introduced Susie Essman by saying that she "recently starred Off-Broadway in The Vagina Monologues –playing the smell."

But Ms. Essman set things right when she got up to the podium. "I had no idea you were so funny," she told Mr. Shaffer. "And such a sharp tongue! That must really hurt David's ass.

"You know, I'm the only woman roasting tonight. And I feel like the belle of the ball," Ms. Essman said, "which I think is appropriate, because we're honoring the ball of the Belz."

Of Mr. Belzer, Ms. Essman said: "I know you love women–as opposed to these other cocksucking misogynists on the dais. The people like Bill Maher … Bill's the kind of guy who calls out his own name when he's coming." Then, referring to Ice T, Ms. Essman said, "I'm sure the word 'bitch' never crossed your lips."

Even Danny Aiello wasn't spared. "Apparently what happened is, a couple of months ago, Belz walked in on Danny screwing Harley," Ms. Essman said. "Belz said, 'Danny, what are you doing?' And Danny said, 'Well, I've got a movie coming out this fall, a miniseries …. '"

Mr. Shaffer introduced comedian Dom Irrera as hailing from Philadelphia, "the City of Brotherly Love, which explains why he likes sucking dick so much." Once again, Mr. Shaffer explained, "I don't do this kind of stuff, but it behooves me."

"Jerry Orbach did my fucking song!" Mr. Irrera said in a mock panic. "Now what am I going to do?" It didn't take him long to recover. "Anyway, I was fucking Belzer in the ass one day," Mr. Irrera said. "Not in a gay way–like a Viking. I had my hands on the horns of his metal helmet."

Mr. Franken scored with an ass joke, too. But first he had to be introduced by Mr. Shaffer. "As you know, Al had his own television show, which was entitled Lateline ," the roastmaster said. "Let me say in all candor, though, that I took a shit today that was darker, funnier and better constructed than that show. And more people saw it. I sold it to Lifetime."

Mr. Franken told Mr. Fontana: "I wish I had a piece of the syndication action on Oz . It's going to be very big on the soon-to-be-launched Ass-Fuck Channel."

Turning to Mr. Belzer, Mr. Franken said: "Richard is what I call the comedian's comedian. And it's not because he makes us laugh, which he does, it's that he almost never makes a real audience laugh." Mr. Franken chalked this up to the fact that Mr. Belzer hadn't written any new material in 20 years. "I mean, he's still doing the Dylan-as-an-old-Jew bit. It was funny–in 1973," he said. "Who knew he'd still be doing it after Dylan had actually become an old Jew?"

The high point of the evening came with Gilbert Gottfried's screaming, soaring performance.

"Well, I didn't have that much time to prepare tonight," Mr. Gottfried said, at a volume three times higher than his fellow roasters. But he explained that roasting was really about just telling a bunch of "really old dirty jokes" and personalizing them with the roastee's name. Mr. Gottfried explained that he didn't have time to take this last step, "so you'll just have to put the name into it."

"A man walks into his son's room," Mr. Gottfried said, beginning his roll. "He goes, 'Son, you could keep doing that, you'll go blind.' The son goes, 'I'm over here, Dad.'"

The crowd screamed louder than Mr. Gottfried.

"A little boy goes up to his father and goes, 'Dad, can I have $50 for blowjob?'" The father's reply, according to Mr. Gottfried: "Son, hang on–you any good?"

"You just put his name in there," Mr. Gottfried added.

And then: "A woman gets into a car accident. The husband rushes to the hospital. The doctor comes out and goes, 'Look, it's bad news. Your wife is crippled from the neck down. She can't speak. Her body is mangled. You'll have to take care of her 24 hours a day. And she has no control over her bowels or bladder. She can't feed herself.'"

Mr. Gottfried paused a millisecond. "The man starts crying. The doctor goes, 'I'm just fucking with ya. She's already dead!'"

As Mr. Gottfried left the podium, the crowd cheered wildly. They stopped and then they started up all over again.

There was nowhere to go but down. But Ice T did surprisingly well. "The last time I looked at a box like this," he said, looking back at the all-white dais, "I was on fucking trial for murder."

Then it was Mr. Shaffer's last chance. He got up to introduce Professor Irwin Corey, who would do, as he had been doing for decades, his great abstract mess of a speech that begins with "However!"

"He's here, but he doesn't know he's here," Mr. Shaffer said of the Friars veteran. "He thinks he's at the strip club on 52nd Street. How else would you explain the dollar bill stuck in Mariska Hargitay's snatch?" Ms. Hargitay looked a little flustered. Mr. Belzer's jaw was dropping in admiration. The Town Hall audience went wild one more time.

"It behooves me to do blue," Mr. Shaffer said.

Siegel Unleashed

ABC film critic and cultural reporter Joel Siegel may be known as the feel-good reviewer of the last 25 years, but he's not incapable of down-and-dirty criticism. And an invitation-only crowd got to see Mr. Siegel bare the fangs beneath his bushy mustache at the Museum of Television and Radio's tribute to him on June 6.

After a series of film clips showing Mr. Siegel noshing on Nathan's hot dogs in Brooklyn and calling actress Farrah Fawcett "a silly blonde whose brains have been baked in the sun," the slight rowdy crowd–an apparent fan club of media lifers that included Good Morning America newswoman Diane Sawyer, That Girl Marlo Thomas, WNBC movie critic Jeffrey Lyons, CNN host Jeff Greenfield, publicist Peggy Siegal, WABC anchor Roz Abrams and WCBS sports anchor Warner Wolf–began shooting questions at the critic.

"Ever have a movie you wanted to give a second chance?" Mr. Lyons asked. Yes, Mr. Siegel said: Amadeus , which he reviewed poorly and later learned to love.

When someone in the audience asked him to name his lousiest interview subject, Mr. Siegel didn't even blink. "Tommy Lee Jones. He's mean," he said. "He's just a mean drunk."

The crowd whooped and clapped. But Mr. Siegel didn't stop there. He blasted opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti for being "nasty and surly and someplace else–an angry Italian–until the [camera] light went on, and then he was kissing my hand." He also nailed classical conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, gleefully reminding the audience that the upper-crust conductor's grandfather had been named Tomashevsky and had been a star of the Yiddish theater.

The chuckles faded when one audience grumpus asked the $145 million question: What did Mr. Siegel, a Disney employee, have to say for himself after doling out one of the few glowing reviews given to his parent company's summer stinker , Pearl Harbor ? "You didn't give it a real review," complained the audience member.

"I did like Pearl Harbor !" Mr. Seigel said, noting that "every film critic works for someone else. Leonard Maltin, who gave Pearl Harbor a more positive review than I, works for Paramount!" Mr. Siegel insisted that he's never been pressured by Disney execs about what he should or shouldn't review. He claimed that working for Disney has actually kept him from doing stories that might be perceived as self-serving, like the one about how the American ecology movement wouldn't be what it is today if "four generations of kids had not grown up loving Bambi ."

–Rebecca Traister