My First Roast Battle!
Roast Battle League Tokyo
Roast Battle has been a mainstay of the Tokyo comedy scene for many years now. The format for Roast Battle originated from the world-famous Comedy Store in Los Angeles and has since popped up at clubs around the United States and the world. Tokyo Comedy Bar hosts Roast Battle once a month and it is one of the premier shows on their calendar. It always brings in a full house as comedians battle it out for the crown.
Having never done a roast battle before, I was a bit nervous when I got booked on the lineup. The trick to roasting is not just having your jokes prepared, but also to be ready for on-the-spot, improvised rebuttals that make up a big part of the judges’ scoring.
Fortunately, I got paired up with Kat and we dubbed our match the “Battle for Gay Island” as we’re both part of the LGBTQ community. Kat and I have had the pleasure of working together on multiple shows before, including the monthly Out of the Closet Ball. This gave us an advantage as we’ve both seen each other’s material and had a lot to work with.
What I think put our match over the top was that we sat together for about an hour to trade notes and both came in with five, well-honed jokes. For Roast Battle you can choose to do 3 - 5 jokes, but we pushed for the maximum amount and I think it paid off.
“Battle for Gay Island”
While a lot of our material focused on LGBTQ-themes, we also worked in a number of other topics and between our set ups and retorts it was an incredibly evenly-matched battle.
One thing I’m proud of is that in addition to focusing on what we did want to talk about — we also addressed whether or not anything was off limits. While a Roast is in theory “no holds barred”, I think in the end it made for a more fun and fair match because we knew what was above board and neither one of us went too low for the laugh.
Getting Featured on Roast Battle League’s YouTube Review
About a week after our match, the Roast Battle Tokyo group chat blew up because we had been featured on the Roast Battle League weekly YouTube. Veterans of the scene, Sarah Keller and Frank Castillo, highlighted some of the best of the back and forth and then gave a review.
I hadn’t expected any of this coverage and to be candid, I’ve been focusing on building out my nascent online comedy profile and this felt like a huge win. Hearing Sarah say that she wanted to see, “a lot more of Sean”, was a huge vote of confidence.
Roast Battle Round 2?
Roast Battle Tokyo is a monthly event and I definitely want to do another iteration in the future. The thing I loved about it was that it required much of the preparation of standup, but also honed that quick-thinking, improvisational element that I loved from my time on The Ride.
Given that Kat and I got to lean on and leverage a lot of “in humor” from the LGBTQ angle, I think it’d be interesting going against someone with a different background in a future battle.
For the most part I’ll be sticking with standup, but for anyone interested in checking out the full battle, link is to the right. Additionally, check out my YouTube for more clips and Events for future shows! Right now we’re in Tokyo for the foreseeable future, but hoping to get US dates on the calendar during some trips home in 2023.