Review: Hacks, "The Roast of Deborah Vance" & "Join the Club"| Season 3, Episodes 3 & 4

Deborah inches closer to a lifelong dream, and Ava sets some boundaries

Photo: Max

The comedy roast is by its very nature a pretty tired joke format. The novelty at this point has more to do with who’s willing to put up with them. “The Roast of Deborah Vance” could have gone in some pretty predictable directions, both in terms of Deborah’s reaction and how DJ’s set goes, but Hacks is not a show that’s going to go in the expected direction, not even for a format as well-known as a roast. So not only does Deborah roll with the jokes from the professional standups, but when DJ unexpectedly excels at the roast, she’s thrilled for her, even though the jokes are viciously at her expense, and it means that DJ has outshined her, at least temporarily.

The roast, ultimately, isn’t the point of the episode at all. Instead, it proves a starting point to tell a sharp, painful story about Deborah’s relationship with her daughter. Earlier, there’d been some standard DJ stuff, in the sense that it was all a little undignified, as things often are with her—her mother cracks a bunch of jokes at her recovery meeting after barely consenting to attend what is actually a pretty massive event for her. Five years of sobriety is major! But Deborah can’t bring herself to connect emotionally with the news, and her reaction to DJ being pregnant is underwhelming, to say the least. The twist of this subplot is not that something too nasty happens at the roast, as you might expect going in, given Deborah’s ego. It’s that DJ finally scores a hit on her mom in a way that really hurts, comparing her need for laughs to the addictive behavior that’s sent her into recovery over and over again.

It’s not exactly revolutionary to point out that many comedians are trying to fill an emotional need they can’t ever fix, but the viciousness of it coming from her daughter makes it clear that this is probably the only insult of the night that has any particular bite for Deborah. The show has always been interested in the tension between the need these people have for any sense of happiness and stability, and their drive for creative success. There are always going to be moments where Deborah and Ava are forced to confront the emotional wreckage they leave in their lives, but, like addicts, to DJ’s point, they’re always going to come crawling back to comedy.