FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Roasting pets funny comments | History Defined

Cyanide & Happiness, the chaotic, creative minds behind one of the internet's more gloriously niche comics, launched a pet roasting service that did exactly what it sounds like. You send them a photo of your animal. They send you back a personalized, lovingly savage written roast of that animal.

People love their pets so completely and find them so objectively hilarious that they are willing to hand over their pictures to see what creative insults people can come up with. It's affection expressed as comedy. And if this thread teaches us anything, it is that the internet is brutal and none of us are safe.

Roast comedy has a longer and more distinguished history than its current internet form might suggest. The tradition dates back to the Friar's Club in New York, a private entertainment club that began hosting celebrity roasts in the 1950s. The format was simple: gather the target's closest friends and colleagues, give them a mic, and let them say the things that would normally get you uninvited to Christmas.

It was mean, it was funny, and everyone understood that you only roast the people you love. Or, in the case of the internet, the pets you find inexplicably hilarious. The format went mainstream when the Friar's Club roasts were adapted for television, eventually becoming the Comedy Central Roast series that turned brutal public mockery into primetime entertainment.

One of the internet’s most roastable creatures at the moment is the infamous Lida Bida Bota But. She is approximately 42,957 years old and held together by prayers and witchcraft. The catarac-clad critter has taken TikTok by storm, along with her siblings Emerald Jade Greenball and Chippy Dippy Dopy Duck. And before you ask, none of this is made up.

Lida is apparently 19 years old, and as many commenters note, “at this point, every nap is a gamble.” She has also gathered some artistic fans who have placed her in renderings of the Titanic sinking, Jurassic scenes, and even as the Mona Lisa. And although we cannot confirm nor deny that she was present for any of these events, we know that her roasts are what get us through the day.

That people deeply love the roast format is not even up for debate. The "Stress Relief" episode of The Office is the highest-rated episode of the entire series, sitting at 9.7 on IMDb, which means that out of nine seasons of TV, the episode where a regional manager of a paper company forces his employees to publicly humiliate him and then immediately regrets it is what the audience voted the absolute peak.

The episode coined what became one of television's most quoted catchphrases: "Boom. Roasted." Three syllables. No further explanation. It is not sophisticated comedy. “Pam, you failed art school. Boom, roasted.” “Oscar, you are gay. Boom, roasted.” Somehow, Michael Scott's misguided attempts at using facts as roasts just land, making us all find a little humor in the absolutely mundane. 

The only true winners here are the pets. Not one of them has read a single comment. Not one of them spent even a fraction of a second worrying about what strangers on the internet thought of their face. They were, in all likelihood, asleep on a couch that cost more than a decent office chair, dreaming about whatever pets dream about, completely unbothered by their viral moment.

These roasts land on everyone except the ones they were aimed at. The love underneath every brutal caption is so obvious it's practically the caption itself. Nobody posts a photo of an animal they don't find completely, irrationally, and embarrassingly wonderful. The roast is just the wrapping. Underneath it is an owner who adores their asymmetrical animals, warts and all. Boom. Roasted.

Do you have an ever scorchier roast to add to any of these pictures? Share them in the comments!