The Behind the Scenes Story of Donald Trump's Comedy Central Roast Is Full Of Some Gems
HuffPo - The woman who was supposed to take Donald Trump’s coat wasn’t hot enough.
It was March 8, 2011, and Comedy Central’s “Roast of Donald Trump” was set to film the next day.
The plan called for Trump to be driven onto the stage in a gilded golf cart flanked by beautiful women. There, he’d hand his coat to another woman before taking his seat on the roastee’s throne. But during the dress rehearsal, Trump grabbed Robert Ferkle, who served as the production’s stage manager.
The proposed woman, Trump said, was “not somebody he wanted to be associated with at that moment,” Ferkle recalled. “In other words, she was not pretty enough.”
To appease Trump, Comedy Central moved the actress elsewhere on the stage, Ferkle said. The show went on.
And what a show it would be.
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I love stuff like this, behind-the-scenes looks at things you know had a ton of shit going on. Especially something like the roast of a thin-skinned egomaniac like Trump.
And I’m sure a lot of it is probably exaggerated in retrospect by the anti-Trump crowd considering the stage he’s on now and trying to make him look as bad as possible… but still interesting. And none of it very surprising.
Here are my favorite highlights –
Trump Tower made it known that two subjects were off-limits: Trump’s past bankruptcies, and any suggestion that he was not as wealthy as he claimed to be. “I don’t think we ever got that in writing, but that was definitely conveyed verbally,” Larsen said. In August, Aaron Lee, another roast writer, posted a note on the app Li.st that referenced Trump’s prohibition on, “any joke that suggests Trump is not actually as wealthy as he claims to be.” Bankruptcy jokes are the “one thing [Trump’s] super sensitive about,” Ross told Jimmy Kimmel in July.
Trump’s executive assistant, Rhona Graff, was the primary conduit of communications between Trump Tower and Comedy Central, and revealed herself to be something of a Trump whisperer.
Graff made known that roasters should address Trump only as “Mr. Trump,” according to Larsen.
The redemptive moment of any roast is what’s called the rebuttal, when the roastee, having just weathered an hour-and-a-half of barbs, takes to the podium to respond. With Trump not a natural comedian, it was up to the writers to give him ammunition.
After the writers went through numerous drafts of Trump’s rebuttal, they forwarded a version to him in early March. He responded a week later with his first set of edits, handwritten in black Sharpie.
“I have done this a long time and nobody blacks out punchlines,” said Jesse Joyce, one of the writers. Scrapping punchlines represents “a classic lack of an understanding of how a joke works,” he added.
Trump’s edits were all over the place. He crossed out an entire riff on condoms in the first draft, scribbling “No” in the margin. Elsewhere, he seemed to revel at opportunities to be crass. He complained a line suggesting Lisa Lampanelli should “shut the fuck up” didn’t end with an exclamation point. But in a later revision, he wanted to switch the line to “get off the stage.”
Trump even suggested changing a line about him being the “smartest man in the world” to being “perhaps the smartest man in the world.”
Even in a script designed to be self-effacing, Trump couldn’t resist boosting himself. At the conclusion of the rebuttal, in an exaggerated (even by Trumpian standards) riff about how he lives in a “25,000 square-foot penthouse atop my solid-gold space station,” Trump ordered that the square footage be goosed to 50,000. He changed a line that read, “I’m sorry, I must go now and make a million dollars somewhere else,” to a “billion” dollars.
The biggest challenge, according to roast participants, was to get Trump to make fun of his hair.
“I had to explain to him why he needed to have some jokes about his own hair,” James said. “I said, ‘You have to own it. If you have a great hair joke, you will be impervious to hair jokes.’”
But Trump resisted. In the first draft, he crossed out a joke about needing to feed his squirrel-like bouffant. When the writers kept the joke in for the second draft, he crossed it out again, offering instead this about his hair: “Look how great it looks.”
The writers eventually convinced Trump to “own” his hair by wrapping follicular self-deprecation into a boast about his wealth. The joke, not in the rebuttal drafts obtained by HuffPost, originally went: “What’s the difference between a wet raccoon and Donald Trump’s hair? A wet raccoon doesn’t have $2 billion.” Trump eventually agreed to use the joke, according to several people involved in the show, so long as the $2 billion was changed to $7 billion. Ross told Kimmel that settling on the amount was like a “business negotiation,” with Trump initially wanting the number to be $10 billion.
All pretty understandable IMO. Gotta keep up appearances.
[via Huffington Post]