And I’m “Peaked in 2000” Ann Coulter

I made a big mistake yesterday. I watched some clips of a Comedy Central roast. Depraved, vicious, unimaginative humor at its best. Not a positive contribution to my life.

You will want to know who they roasted. Answer: Ann Coulter. The problem is this: they claimed they were roasting Rob Lowe.

Rob got quite a few zingers; no doubt about that. But if you look the roast up and see how people reacted to it, you will find that most of the venom was heaped on Ann Coulter. Lowe faded into the background, as if his presence were an afterthought.

If you look at Youtube and check out pirated clips of the roast, you will see an endless array of watchlists and videos with titles like, “ANN COULTER DESTROYED AT ROB LOWE ROAST!!!!!!!!!!!” People who hate Coulter have carpet-bombed Youtube with their videos. It’s almost as if an old Nazi collaborator from Hungary were paying them to do it. It’s relatively difficult to find clips focusing on the other attendees. The Youtube hive, with its editing, did its best to make Coulter’s weak performance seem like a Hindenburgian disaster. That’s something of an exaggeration.

I didn’t see the whole thing, because, why would I? To call it mean-spirited would be like calling Rosie O’Donnell a tomboy. All Comedy Central roasts are mean-spirited, and they’re also extremely tasteless. If you want to watch third-tier comedians you dimly remember call each other things like “whore” and, well, other things I don’t want to repeat here, Comedy Central roasts are right up your alley. If you’re looking for clever, relatively gentle ribbing, forget it.

There used to be something called The Friars’ Club, and they put on roasts. Dean Martin was the host, I think. They roasted people like Sinatra and Milton Berle. The roasts were funny and clean. The meanest person who appeared was Don Rickles, and if you think Don Rickles was mean, you completely missed the point of his act. What Comedy Central does now is much different. It’s as if a bunch of mentally ill teenagers broke into the Friars’ Club studio while Dean was away. On top of the crudeness and hostility, the performers tend to be people who have a hard time finding work. David Spade, Lisa Lampanelli (who?), Jeff Ross (who?), and other D-listers show up, probably to get money to pay for groceries.

The shots at Ann Coulter were really something. Some were well within the expansive bounds of Comedy Central roast standards. Others were so vicious, they were too disturbing to be funny.

The thing the performers, writers, and professional audience failed to understand is this: roasts are only funny when you pick on people you don’t actually hate. When Norm MacDonald picks on David Spade, it’s fine, because they get along in real life. When people who truly want to see Ann Coulter die insult her, it’s an off-putting glimpse of real hatred, which is not funny.

It’s strange; it sounds like I’m endorsing their usual standard of abuse. I’m not. They have no concept of boundaries. I’m just saying that whatever limits they generally recognize were violated egregiously when Ann Coulter showed up.

Here’s the meanest thing they did to her: when she took her turn at the end of the roast, a lot of the people in the room refused to laugh. Some just stared at her. It was obvious that they decided, in advance, to see to it that she bombed. That’s a very cruel thing to do to an entertainer.

Here’s an interesting thing about comedy: it only works when the audience consents. If the audience isn’t with you, you WILL bomb. It doesn’t matter how funny you are. This is true of all performing acts, but it’s particularly true of comedy.

I remember seeing Steve Martin perform when I was in high school. His opening act was John Sebastian, the singer who wrote “Welcome Back” and “Coconut Grove,” among other circa-1970 hits. Nobody wanted to see him sing. It was a mistake to book him. He had a tape machine with him instead of a band. He went through his whole set while people screamed at him, booed, and gave him the finger. No encore. He looked like he wanted to grant the audience’s wish and disappear. When the tape ended, he was dying to get off the stage. Steve Martin came out, did his set in a hurry, and left as soon as he could without violating his contract. He seemed furious.

That’s what the Coulter roast was like.

Coulter is a tough bird, but she was clearly knocked off balance by the toxic deluge of abuse. Even Jewel, whose stage persona is an inoffensive, girlish waif who sings about love and daisies and so on, said this: “I do want to say as a feminist that I can’t support everything that’s been said tonight, but as someone who hates Ann Coulter, I’m delighted.” This was after an SNL cast member named Pete Davidson called Coulter the c-word.

Coulter’s delivery was slow, and it sounded as if she had been drinking. Her jokes were not great, but they seemed much worse than they were, because so many people in the studio had decided to punish her with silence.

Coulter’s performance was marred by her choice of material. Years ago, her buddies got together and wrote a Fox News comedy show called “The Half-Hour News Hour.” It featured people like Manny Coto (who?) and Mike Rowe (no threat to Dave Chappelle). The show was really bad. After the roast, she said she and her friends had written her jokes. Naturally, I thought of the Fox show. I strongly suspect the same crew was the engine behind her Comedy Central bus plunge. “We’re going to roast Major Strasser. Round up the usual suspects.”

Conservatives hate new talent. They’re all about promoting people who already have a piece of the pie. They support hacks. The Fox show was a great example of what happens when a movement eats its young. Coulter gets exposure, P.J. O’Rourke gets exposure, Tucker Carlson (unbelievably) gets the Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly shows, Mike Rowe gets called in to write things, but talented people who haven’t made it yet are ignored.

Remember Allahpundit? Excellent writer, right? Where is he now? Writing for Hot Air. A contrived corporate blog. We will never see him on TV. He will never be asked to write for a major TV show or a conservative movie comedy. Jeff Goldstein never made it. Moxie never made it. What’s-his-name at IMAO never made it. Nobody gets called up from the minors except for untalented tokens who prove how diverse we are.

Of course, Coulter bombed. The whole room hated her, and she was playing in an NFL game backed up by a squad of midgets. Okay, not NFL. More like a college team on whatever level is below MIT.

I sound like I support Ann Coulter. I don’t. I got over that years ago, when I saw how nutty she really was. I’m just marveling at the cruelty of the left and the foolishness of Team Coulter and the conservatives who decide who makes it and who doesn’t.

For all her faults and errors, which are substantial, Ann Coulter is brilliant. She’s the one who labeled illegal aliens “undocumented Democrats.” She has an extremely rare ability to think on her feet and cut opponents to the quick. On Comedy Central, she looked like an amateur who was out of her element. Nice job, leftists and GOP-approved Coulter stooges.

I don’t actually care about what happens on pity-inducing TV roasts staffed by performers we feel sorry for. What really interests me about the story is the Christian angle. While Coulter is the farthest thing from a preacher, and while she is not a good role model for any Christian, she belongs to the faith, and she sometimes promotes our beliefs. People on the left hate her for that. They can’t tell a saint from Judas Iscariot. We’re all evil in their minds, and all cruelty toward us is considered justified. This, not her harsh humor, is the main reason she was treated so badly.

I sincerely believe there were people on the dais who would publicly celebrate if Ann Coulter were burned alive in a house fire. I think some of them would happily beat her to death with their own fists. Their hostility is representative of the general mood of leftists. Right now, lynchings are illegal, so leftists content themselves with beating Republicans at political rallies. In the future, they will have more “flexibility,” as Obama once put it. When those days come, we will see people act out, with their bodies, the hostility the roast performers heaped on Coulter with their tongues.

In 1900, no one would have thought the civilized, orderly Germans and Austrians capable of shooting babies or pushing Jews into gas chambers. At that time, they were not allowed to do things like that. As the government became more supportive of violence and hatred, people showed what they were really capable of doing. We’re going to see that level of brutality here, before long. We’re already seeing it at Trump rallies. Think how bad it will be when the gun-grabbers disarm the prey. The violence will come to our doorsteps, even in places like Florida and Texas.

What a strange time to be alive.

Many times, I’ve thought to myself that Jews in prewar Europe should have known what was coming. I’ve wondered why they didn’t leave while they could. Now I look around at American Christians, and I ask similar questions. Don’t we know what’s on the way? Why aren’t we leaving big cities and blue states? When the real violence starts, the TV segments and Youtube videos won’t come from West Virginia and Wyoming. They’ll come from places like L.A, D.C., and New York City. Conservatives in those places are already afraid to go out in public with conservative gear on, and they’re afraid to expose their beliefs at work. If things are already that bad, why stick around?

Jews are going to get the worst of it. Christians can move to the country, but Jews are city people. Orthodox Jews are literally incapable of surviving on their own. They have to have synagogues, yeshivas, kosher butchers, and so on. They’re not allowed to hunt. Look where they concentrate. Chicago, New York, L.A., Boston, and South Florida. Liberal areas with big, angry ghettos. Not a promising picture. At least the Jews in Florida can carry guns.

When the mobs come for Jews, most Jews will be surprised. “We voted for government programs! We voted for ‘immigrants’! We rode with the Freedom Riders! We fought poll taxes and literacy tests!” It won’t matter. Persecution isn’t based on your behavior. It’s based on God’s love for you. Anything God loves is hateful to Satan’s children.

It’s sort of like the Army’s hatred of Clevinger in Catch-22:

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he told him glumly. “They hate Jews.” “But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger. “It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right.

I don’t care what happens to Ann Coulter’s career. She is not helpful. But I do care what cruelty to Ann Coulter presages.

Oh, well. I’m on my way out of this place. I’m going to move to an area where you have to have Amazon Prime to get a bagel. If riots go mobile and start visiting red areas, I won’t have to use my guns to protect myself. My neighbors will beat me to it. I should be safe much longer than anyone in South Florida.