Tom Brady‘s Netflix roast included jokes about the end of his marriage to Gisele Bündchen, his alleged use of plastic surgery and the Deflategate scandal, but no comedian roasted the NFL icon for once kissing his son on the lips.
A 2018 documentary about Brady went viral that year for footage of Brady kissing his 11-year-old son Jack on the lips. Brady was mocked on social media as a result and the moment sparked a larger debate about parents’ affection for their children, especially because he asked for a second kiss from his son after saying the first one was just a “peck.” To some viewers’ surprise, the topic of Brady kissing his son never came up during the roast.
On a new “Comedy Bang Bang” episode, comedian and acclaimed Brady roaster Nikki Glaser revealed the group all made the collective decision not to crack jokes about Brady kissing his son. Brady’s kids were off limits to the roasters.
“We didn’t joke about the kid thing,” Glaser said. “Like that was a thing that we all chose … like, we’re not gonna make fun of the kid kissing thing, which is truly all I knew about him. I was obsessed with that kid kissing video. I thought it was so fascinating.”
“And then I wrote a bunch of jokes about it, and it just sucks the couple days before to hear, ‘Oh, by the way, no kid kiss,’” Glaser added. “I was doing a read-through with the writers room for the first time a couple days before and they were like, ‘You have to lose 30% of that,’ because I was calling back to it, it was a funny throughline. All of a sudden this big chunk comes out. You feel OK about it, but you’re like, ‘Why did you sign up for this then?’ But also his kids didn’t ask for it.”
Even though Glaser and her fellow roasters did not make jokes about Brady’s kids, it turns out the Netflix roast still ended up upsetting them. Brady himself admitted on “The Pivot Podcast” a few days after the roast that he regretted doing it because some of the jokes hurt his children. He didn’t specify which jokes, but many viewers assumed it was those targeting his relationship with Bündchen.
“I liked when the jokes were about me. I thought they were so fun. I didn’t like the way they affected my kids,” Brady said on the podcast. “It’s the hardest part about … like the bittersweet aspect of when you do something that you think is one way and then all of a sudden you realize: I wouldn’t do that again because of the way that it affected actually the people that I care about the most in the world.”
According to roaster Andrew Schulz, another subject that was supposed to be off limits during the Brady roast was Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s 2019 arrest for allegedly soliciting prostitution in a Florida massage parlor. Charges against Kraft were dropped the following year. When Kraft’s attendance was confirmed at the event, roasters were allegedly told not to make jokes about “happy endings” in relation to the Patriots owners. Of course, that didn’t stop comedian Jeff Ross from making a massage joke about Kraft live on air. The moment went viral as Brady stood up from his seat and told Ross: “Don’t say that shit again.”
“When Tom checked Jeff Ross, I think that was 100% real,” Schulz said on the “Flagrant” podcast. “The reason why I think it’s real is because they told us no jokes about happy endings with Bob Kraft. I had a Bob Kraft [joke] … Tom asked us not to do anything with the massage shit.”
The day after the Brady roast, Ross appeared on “The Rich Eisen Show” and downplayed that the NFL icon was actually pissed off at him because of the Kraft joke.
“No way,” Ross said. “He was having fun. You know, it’s like that’s his dad. Robert Kraft is like a father figure to him. He was just showing his love for Robert Kraft. And Robert Kraft loved it. We had a great talk afterwards. He was so happy that I gave him a shoutout and a salute. It was beautiful.”
The three-hour roast of Tom Brady is available to stream on Netflix.
