Have You Tried Roasting One Another?

4 key benefits of responsible roasting

Many organizations struggle with establishing a fun, transparent and creative environment in the office. If your workplace is facing this dilemma, I’d like to pose a question that may help: Have you tried roasting one another? 

You might not have considered it, but the roast is a time-honored way of deepening connections between people and improving company culture. Although the comedic roast as a celebrity event started in 1949 at New York City’s famed Friar’s Club, using insults to laugh and bond with others has a long history. For example, 15th and 16th-century Scottish poets engaged in flyting contests – basically competitive word jousting. These skilled word assassins demonstrated their vocal prowess while expressing mutual respect.

When done well, the roast can create a sense of community and an environment where people feel part of something bigger than themselves. However, when done poorly, the roast can become an HR nightmare. It seems to be a high-risk/high-reward situation. But under the right conditions, roasting can yield significant dividends. 

Following are four key benefits of responsible roasting and how it can provide a great boost to your workplace culture. 
 

• Making a people connection. Learning to roast well can increase your ability to connect with people. Developing skills that teach you how to soften edgy statements without offending your co-worker makes for fun and pays off when you inevitably have to deliver critical feedback. The skillful roaster makes the roastee feel like they’re on the inside, not an outsider being attacked as a stranger. 
• Mastering the interaction Roasting helps develop skills related to reading the dynamics of interaction. Becoming a skillful roaster involves learning to read body language and take the metaphorical temperature in a room. These skills are useful for identifying tensions as well as what other people need at the moment. 
• Ease the stress. Roasting is a tension reliever and many organizations still need to figure out how to deal with workplace tension. An annual roasting event where leadership serves as the guests of honor is a healthy outlet that can reduce the perceived chasm between people in different positions. It can also be one way to satisfy calls for workplace transparency and accountability. 
• Learn to be creative. Roasting is an exercise in comic creativity. If you are looking for ways to produce creativity, this is a fun way to do it. 

There are plenty of examples of how the roast can be done well. I’ll share one that came from my colleague Steve Cody, CEO of Communications firm Peppercomm, whom I partner with on the unique Laughing Matters Advisory Council:

I once pulled a prank on an employee we’ll call Sabrina. Upon her return to NYC from a nice beach vacation, we congratulated her on being transferred to our San Francisco office, a move that she knew nothing about. There were balloons, greeting cards, a banner reading, “Go West, Young Woman,” and lots of emails thanking her for all of her excellent work here on the East Coast. She was simply gobsmacked at the outpouring of well-wishes and shocked that we would relocate her without even so much as a word of conversation about the move. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, and we instantly let her off the hook. She laughed out loud at how thoroughly we’d committed to the bit and immediately began plotting her revenge. 

A few weeks later, I was on a vacation of my own and Sabrina went to work, whipping up the retaliation. With the emotional roller coaster she’d ridden still fresh in her mind, she conspired with a few coworkers to stuff five thousand plastic balls that one might find in a local Chuck E. Cheese into my office closet. When I returned to work, they waited for me to open that door, but as luck would have it, it was a warm day with no jacket required. The anticipation built and built, and it started to look like I’d never open that door and the payoff was not forthcoming. However, another employee who was well known for always shivering at work at any temperature asked for a sweater to borrow. When I opened the door, it rained a deluge of plastic balls all over me. The entire office burst into hysterical laughter. I laughed along and even kept the balls all over my office for a week to show everyone how funny it was to me. Revenge had been achieved and those balls were the talk of the office for a month.

The Friar’s Club motto provides a good model for how to pull this off in a way that avoids a trip from HR: “We only roast the ones we love.” Unlike its Comedy Central offspring, The Friar’s Club version was a community affair, an opportunity to come together in the spirit of harmony. Comedians drew on intimate knowledge of the honoree to celebrate persons they admired and loved. As the writer Hallie Cantor observes, “The roasts felt (as far as I can tell from YouTube clips) like the gathering of a community.” 

Building a community is hard. However, history has shown that ritualized insults can be a powerful tool for bonding. 

Dr. Luvell Anderson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University.