I just finished the show Shoresy, which might quietly have had some of the most heartfelt happy-feel scenes in all of television.
The show follows Shoresy, a goonish Canadian hockey player approaching his middle age years, as he fights to build a championship winning hockey team (adult rec league, NHL). He assembles a crew of extremely unique characters, and proceeds to swing back and forth from absolute debauchery, and beautiful little moments where the human being deep down shines through.
One of the most important parts of Shoresy’s relationship with his team (and literally everyone else around him) is that they roast the absolute piss out of each other every single episode. They’ll go back and forth for several minute-long sessions, just ripping into each other one by one. Themes emerge, and you come to know characters by their quirks and flaws. Afterwards, they go out drinking and celebrating. It’s kind of a thing.
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Lately, I’ve seen the roast conversation come up IRL too. It happens every few years, it seems, and I’m hoping against hope that we can learn from it in a more permanent way this time.
I’m not sure why it shocks people that men basically HAVE to be mean to each other in order to build deep and meaningful relationships with each other. It makes perfect sense when you really think about it…
For us, the simplest moments are the best, we don’t need much. The roast serves 3 main purposes that we should talk about:
Honesty Signaling
It ain’t the ones who are mean to you, it’s the ones that are ‘nice’ up front, and mean behind your back.
When your friends pick on you, it sends a signal to the back of your brain (or wherever) that “this person is honest, and can probably be trusted”. There’s also likely some healthy outrage, embarrassment, or annoyance, but that’s just silly front brain (monkey brain) stuff. They may be assholes, but you can trust people who tell you the hard stuff.
Anyone who is ONLY nice to you, and never even attempts to make fun of you in a playful way is highly questionable. It means there’s a wall up that cannot be breached for the time being, and you’ll be operating the relationship from opposite sides of the wall. It’s tough to navigate in business, I recommend caution and discretion. You don’t want to ruin a relationship with a poorly timed joke, but there’s no better way to get closer with someone than to be able to make fun of each other and laugh about it together.
The “Tough Test”
It comes and goes in and out of popularity every few years to say things like “kids are too soft these days, we need to bring back bullying!”
Kids bullying each other is fairly harmless, and probably does have a net positive effect. The most likely outcomes are that the bully grows up and is embarrassed by their past action, and the bullied gets a healthy dose of motivation to do better. Adult bullying, however, is absurd and obnoxious. Picking on another, weaker adult for personal pleasure is a silly, wasteful thing to do. At the same time, I think we may have lost the word that would better work in place of “bullying”, to achieve the desired meaning. In general, everyone is “soft” today, compared with our ancestors who settled the frontier, stormed the beaches of Normandy, and worked the coal mines. Almost nobody today (well, besides David Goggins…) could hold a candle to any of those people, and the shit they did just to survive the day.
The hardest thing you’ve ever done is the hardest thing you’ve ever done (can’t find a person to directly attribute this one to, but I didn’t come up with it). It means your tolerance for difficult things is directly tied to the amount of difficulty you’ve faced in your life, and throughout your day. If you grew up in the Hamptons driving Porsches with a happy family, a minor inconvenience (by normal person standards) will be quite a large disruption to you. If you grew up in da hood, surviving gang fights, something like a car accident, or failing a class is probably no big deal to you.
When dudes pick on each other, they’re trying to figure out exactly how tough you are. Not in the sense of “could I take him??”, but instead more along the lines of, “would he pull his weight and protect his friends, or would he run?” It’s programmed into us very deep down to be constantly re-assessing our crew, and judging how safe we are based on the collective abilities of the group. If someone doesn’t pass the sniff test, they become a drag on the group’s resources, and are often subjected to the lion’s share of the roasting. The rest of the group is subconsciously letting him know that they’re all a little concerned about his ability to contribute, and that there are a few things to work on (usually the topic of the roasts). It’s literally out of love. They want their buddy to toughen up, so that they can together protect and defend each other when needed.
Appreciation & Noticing
A healthy group of guys will show their affection differently than a healthy group of women, or a family. Their “attacks” on each other also serve as a subtle way of letting them know that they are paying attention, and care. Instead of saying something lame like “wow, you look so good today, great job working out!”, it’ll probably be along the lines of “dude, you get any skinnier you’re gonna fly away”. Lame example, I know, but it serves.
Most men don’t really need much validation, or acknowledgement. Someone simply noticing the work they’ve put into something that matters to them counts for 1,000x a regular compliment.
It’s about familiarity, not dominance, winning, or anything silly like that.
This isn’t to say that it’s “weak” or “lame” for guys to compliment guys. Quite the opposite. I love giving my buddies compliments, and making their day. Thing is, being able to skillfully roast each other is the only path through the next gate of friendship. You cannot progress to that deeper level of trust and love until you’re able to bounce friendly insults back and forth with each other.
I struggled with this one a lot when I was younger, honestly. I had what a lot of young men also have today… a lot of self consciousness and a weak sense of humor. It frustrated me greatly to watch other guys effortlessly float through their relationships with other young men. My dumbass didn’t realize they were all just making fun of each other, and laughing at themselves. That’s how it works.
The fact is, just being nice all day is kinda boring. Being able to roast and “poke” at each other serves to keep things fun, exciting, and also ends up being a form of fact-finding. You discover the “lines” that can and cannot be crossed. You find out more about someone by testing their defenses and tossing things at them than you do complimenting them.
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Next time you see the conversation come up, I hope you’ll remember this piece.
We cannot continue to apply these nonsensical “civilized” rules to male relationships. If everyone is afraid to say anything, men will be unable to form deep and lasting bonds with each other (we can get pretty darn close to true brotherhood under the right conditions). I think the systematic destruction of male relationships was intentional, but that’s a conversation for another day…
Men are unique in how they get along with each other. It’s specifically unique with man-to-man, bro-to-bro relationships, and deserves it’s own observation and respect.
Let dudes fight, figure things out, and accidentally become best friends the next week.