Rob Reiner Roasted

By Stephen M. Silverman

07/17/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

It was black tie and blue humor at Friday night's Friars Club roast of Rob Reiner at a banquet in New York. Besides the more than 1,000 guests on hand, celebrities on the dais included Billy Crystal, Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfuss and Jerry Orbach. Comic and ex-sitcom star Brett Butler, there to roast Reiner, told PEOPLE, "Actually, I don't know what's so funny about Rob Reiner. He's so accomplished, he's happily married, he's got beautiful children. What the hell's funny about that?" Richard Belzer of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," took another view of the roastee. "He's here of his own free will," said Belzer. At the end of the night, "I want him to feel profoundly insulted and laugh a lot, if that's possible." Anne Meara (whose husband, Jerry Stiller, was the subject of last year's roast) passed on making any judgments about the raw humor of the evening, but told PEOPLE: "The Friars do a wonderful thing. They give the roastees $100,000 to disperse to any charities they choose."