Roast me, reddit - be the star of your very own roast

If you have a sense of humour and you're able to take a joke, you're in luck - you could have your own personal roast! And you won't have to worry about India's outrage brigade getting their panties in a twist.

To the still-uninitiated (what rock have you been living under?), the roast in question is not of the gastronomic variety. Instead, it's a gathering where jokes are cracked at the expense of one lucky (?) person, the roastee. It may seem like an unpleasant experience for the roastee, but it's meant to be an honour and it's always good to be able to laugh at oneself.

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When the AIB roast happened in early 2015 it stole the headlines - first for its devil-may-care attitude, and later for the shitstorm it stirred up. The resultant fallout might have put AIB off roasts altogether, but if you're anything like me, getting roasted is a fantastic proposition.

The only problem? It's hard to find a group of genuinely funny friends, and if your friends genuinely are funny, they've probably already used every joke for you. Luckily, we live in the age of the internet, where there are solutions to problems you didn't know you had.

/r/RoastMe

Which brings us to, quite possibly, one of my favourite Reddit subreddits ever - /r/RoastMe. With over 160,000 community members, it's dedicated to taking the proverbial piss out of willing redditors.

It works in the simplest way possible.

All one needs to do is upload a picture of yourself holding a sign saying /r/Roast Me, like this:

You can also add a little background information to help would-be roasters along. I led with just the most basic of information to test the community's creativity - "Indian journalist". Then I waited.

Turns out I didn't have to wait long, because this was comment number one:

For those of you who aren't NBA fans and don't now who James Harden is, click here. Any doubts I had about the community's creativity were silenced. There were also gems like these:

Hey, there's a reason the community's tagline is "the thicker the skin, the better the roast". It wasn't all comic gold though (is anything except MSG ever?) There's always the one idiot who responds with some unfunny trash, but you gotta take the good with the bad.

The community is clear about what it's meant for though - humour. The guidelines are simple:

It's a comedy subreddit! Keep that in mind.

Try to make a joke, not just a thoughtless insult.

Roast away.

And for the most part the roasters follow it to the T. There are dozens of fresh roastees on a daily basis and almost every one of them gets their fill. Sure the sheer volume of roastees means you might not get as many comments as you'd like, but there is a solution to that.

Since it's a roast, uploading the best possible picture of yourself makes no sense. The worse the picture and the crazier the information, the better the roast. An image like this:

Insert Image: http://imgur.com/IZ3QwF7

Will get you comments like this:

Sure there are some that are just plain nasty, not to mention deeply unfunny, but they're few and far between. Here are some that absolutely had me in splits, and there's many more on the daily:

The community's gotten so popular they now even have a twitter handle that's absolute gold:

"This looks like a brochure picture for a school i'd never want to go to."https://t.co/MNSc5vK9Jr #RoastMe pic.twitter.com/m7ZeeyVyK3

- Roast Me (@officialroastme) January 13, 2016

"You're the "After" picture in a meth ad."https://t.co/RNITNOPKtx #RoastMe pic.twitter.com/EysMiGcb4B

- Roast Me (@officialroastme) January 13, 2016

"You could screen an IMAX movie on that forehead"https://t.co/ztYHS0XLLa #RoastMe pic.twitter.com/4rd8meiKe4

- Roast Me (@officialroastme) January 13, 2016

It's a community that's growing and something India needs to embrace because we can do many things, but we can't seem to take a joke. So if you feel like being roasted, roasting some unfortunate souls or just scrolling through reams of epic insult comedy, what are you waiting for?

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