The Tom Brady roast was a Super Bowl of cruelty

Tom Brady must really need money, or attention, or proof that he’s a bro. He needed it bad enough to do that Netflix roast, in which he gallantly sacrificed the mothers of his children to clumsy third-rate comics, whose hammy punchlines fell like refrigerators hitting sidewalks, splatting Brady’s reputation for intelligence beneath them. By the time the three-hour vulgarian parade was over, there were two conclusions: Football players can’t do funny, only coarse, and Brady wasn’t the one who got roasted — he stuck his exes with that tab.

Only sycophants blinded by Brady’s seven Super Bowl rings could have found the performance comedic. You want funny? Here you go. “God gives you a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one at a time,” Robin Williams once said. Now that’s funny, and it’s offered here as a reminder of what real comedy sounds like and also as a suggestion of what could have possessed Brady to serve as executive producer as well as star in this blustery burlesque.

Brady’s ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen, who since her divorce has been linked to a jujitsu trainer, became literally the butt of the night. Brady’s uncomfortable plastic grin was accompanied by the canned heehaws of fake laughter from a crowd whose jaws were stretched tight from the effort of cackling overbroadly at lines like this from Kevin Hart.

“You f—ed your coach. But let me tell you something … that’s what you do to maintain your happiness. You understand, sometimes you got to f— your coach. You know who else f—ed that coach? Gisele. She f—ed that karate man.”

Funny? No, just lamely, meanly tasteless, and not because of the language but because it’s pointless. You want funny? Here:

“If God made the body and the body is dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer,” Lenny Bruce said. That’s funny — because it’s true and cleverly put, and it makes you laugh at your own fixed beliefs, which is the point of real comedy.