For decades, the Friars Club has been America’s temple of comedy, a fraternity of jokesters and others who relish the rimshot and proudly regard bad taste as a core virtue.

How bad?

Jack Black showed up to be roasted and dropped his pants on the red carpet. Gilbert Gottfried thought it would be funny to try a 9/11 joke just weeks after the attacks. Mourners at Milton Berle’s memorial service could not stop talking about his legendary (euphemism here).

I saw him sink a four-foot putt with it.

Ba-dum-bum.

Despite the Friars’ puckish vulgarity — or maybe because of it — their Manhattan headquarters, a six-story landmark townhouse known as “the Monastery,” has long been a cradle of celebrity, and the club’s roasts are the stuff of legend. Frank Sinatra, Ed Sullivan and Jerry Lewis all directed its affairs, and it was an entertainment force during an era when television had a handful of channels and America a smaller constellation of stars.