Dark Roast. It’s an impressive-sounding coffee description that implies richness and sophistication, which makes us imagine the extra depth and complexity coffee gets from spending the extra time in the roasting phase of coffee preparation.

If this is your first reaction, you might be surprised to learn that coffee snobs actively deride and avoid dark roast. To those in the know, dark roast is a red flag for bad coffee.

To be clear, it’s not a sign or guarantee of bad coffee. There can be perfectly good dark roasts. Some of them get rave reviews online. I’d love to try Kicking Horse Kick Ass Coffee just for the cool name, but the good dark roasts can get pretty expensive.

But dark roast is definitely a legitimate red flag. Bad coffee purveyors reliably use dark roast to hide shitty coffee. Over-roasting at high temperatures hides moldy beans and insect damage. Too-high temperatures give the impression of consistency, making everything taste the same no matter where you’ve scavenged the contents from.

Dark roasting breaks down the cellular structure of the beans, pushing its oils to the surface prematurely, making it all turn rancid on exposure to air. Dark Roast is 100% a technique for covering up how shitty your coffee is. Giving the process a name that makes it sound luxurious and sophisticated is one of the greatest lies in the modern world, right up there with trickle-down economics, and the only person to ever bankrupt a casino is “good at business.”

As I mentioned, there can be some excellent dark roast coffee. But most people in the know will more reliably seek lightly roasted coffee, which more honestly reveals its origin and is a better source of nuanced flavour profiles.

This is not the first time I’ve used a coffee analogy for stand-up comedy, but this time it’s even more salient because the word “roast” is shared in both ends of the simile.

So what is roasting in comedy? Wikipedia tells us that “A roast is a form of insult comedy, originating in American humor, in which a specific individual, a guest of honor, is subjected to jokes at their expense, as well as genuine praise and tributes.” A roast is, or is supposed to be, a playful insult.

Even though I don’t participate in a lot of roast comedy, mostly because I think that attacking ideas, phenomena, trends and aspects of culture is a lot more meaningful than attacking specific people, I’ve done a bit. It’s not my favourite formal comedic form, but I’m not bad at it.

If you’ve followed me closely enough you’ll know my argument – that every joke is a kind of roast. Every joke typically derives from an observation about how something is unfair, unjust, irrational, redundant, self-contradictory or just plain dumb. Therefore, all jokes are roasting something. The only question is what’s being roasted (are we punching up or down?) and how dark our roast is.

So, to recap: Roasting for coffee is applying heat and pressure to reveal flavour and character, where roasting for comedy is applying heat and pressure to reveal flavour and character.

Over-roasting coffee causes damage but hides and compensates for shitty content.

So you can probably guess that what I’d like to argue today is that over-roasting in comedy also causes damage while hiding and compensating for shitty content.

When it comes to analogies, Mark Normand has nothing on me 🙂

Hang around the open mic scene long enough and you’ll see some edgelords. They go out of their way to be mean and shocking. They believe that mean and shocking can substitute for clever and funny, that brute-force aggression can do the heavy lifting for actual humour. The visceral and involuntary reaction of shock is an acceptable substitute for the visceral and involuntary reaction of laughter, and after reliably eliciting it for a while, the perpetrator can call themselves a specific kind of comedian and believe it.

This is dark roasting, accepting increased bitterness and acidity as a by-product of hiding weak content, knowing it tricks most people. The pitfalls of dark roast are generally only known by experts, and this means that the comedians buffing with their excessive heat and pressure aren’t even good enough to recognise that they’re masking bad product.

So here’s an example, though I try not to call anyone out by name here, and today will be no exception. Statistically, you and everyone else reading this lives so far from me and my city that names wouldn’t matter anyway.

A couple of weeks ago a comic from out of town put on a show. Calls himself “Australia’s funniest boomer”, and his advanced age seems to be most of his act. I’ve seen this stuff before, as there are tons of older comics all over YouTube making a gimmick out of how old they are. Being nearly sixty and having some material about that, I’d be a strong contender to get a support gig with this show.

But that’s not how politics works, and the role went to a much younger comic with a reputation as a dark roast barista. This comic is mostly associated with being mean these days. For a couple of years he traded on likeable, then swapped it for being edgy and taking on a lot of MC work. It means a lot of stage time without pressure to write strong material, which he never seemed to get around to doing.

Mostly he’s known for recently telling someone in the audience to kill themselves, a story often retold in our scene. It’s not funny, not even a joke. I’ve seen this kind of free range aggression in his sets and many others in the last year. They work the room, taking shots at everyone in the audience and all of the other acts without anyone ever calling them out for not having any actual jokes.

You can reliably hide how shitty the coffee is by aggressively roasting it. Serve it with confidence and watch everyone who’s scared of looking uncool admire the emperor’s new outfit.

I found out he’d gotten the “funniest boomer” gig when he announced to the group that he didn’t tell them to kill themselves but did tell them they’d all be dead within 3 weeks anyway.

Is that edgy, or what? I’m just wondering why that anecdote was shared. Was that supposed to be a hero story in which he proved how funny and clever he is? With that? You don’t need me to tell you whether that’s premium comedy genius that could only come from a skilled and funny professional or the kind of shitty zinger you’d hear in a playground.

The magic of applying excessive heat and pressure is that nobody can tell whether the content has any value. That’s my main grievance with edgelord comedy. It can be funny but it doesn’t have to be. So it usually isn’t. Funny is an optional extra that’s not included, and it bluffs people into going along with the lie.

You know, like cheap, nasty, dark roast coffee.

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