Coulter, after all, has arguably based her entire profession on trolling TV viewers and political commentators with intentionally shocking, awful statements. To enumerate them all would be impossible—she’s less a pundit and more a vessel for free-associative hate speech, much of it recently directed against Mexican immigrants and Muslims living in the United States, all part of her devoted support for the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Her newsmaking brand isn’t dissimilar from the approach to writing a roast-appropriate joke: Craft an insult that’s as vicious as possible but still ends on a laugh line, a wink to the audience that suggests the whole thing is all in good fun. Coulter, however, mostly lacks that final element—her defenders might claim that she’s just trying to push buttons, but her arena isn’t the world of stand-up.

Still, it makes some vague sort of sense that Coulter might work within the medium, and she was clearly eager to promote her new book In Trump We Trust, a copy of which she brought to the stage with her. But the main reason to include her was obviously so Comedy Central could court some controversy. Surely few people were truly excited about Lowe being cut down to size, but part of the format of the special is that the roasters also turn on each other. And so the odd grab-bag of celebrities on the dais all gleefully turned their fire toward Coulter. The softball jokes about Lowe’s lack of fame and decades-old sex tape scandal harmlessly bounced off of their target, but the jokes directed at Coulter were genuinely raw and angry, and she seemed bewildered by what was happening.

Part of the theater of the roast is appearing to be in on the joke—it’s why a big celebrity like Justin Bieber will take part, to claim the cachet of being able to shrug off a mean dig with a smile. Coulter, instead, responded to the lines with a sort of frozen, tortured grin, rendering the whole thing deeply uncomfortable. Much of the material was about her right-wing politics, with multiple roasters joking that she was part of the Ku Klux Klan. “Last year we had Martha Stewart, who sells sheets, and now we have Ann Coulter, who cuts eyeholes in them,” Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson said. Plenty more, though, was directed at her looks—a not-uncommon subject for any roast, but in this case featuring some truly brutal, wince-inducing lines. “Ann Coulter is one of the most repugnant, hateful, hatchet-faced bitches alive,” the British comic Jimmy Carr said. “But it’s not too late to change, Ann—you could kill yourself.”

Even comparatively “harmless” non-comedians jumped in: The retired quarterback Peyton Manning compared Coulter to a horse. (Many of the jokes at the roasts are scripted by off-stage writers, and this was no different.) The singer Jewel summed up the bizarre event when she joked, “As a feminist, I can’t support everything that’s being said up here tonight, but as somebody who hates Ann Coulter, I’m delighted.” When Coulter finally took the stage, she bombed hard in front of the hostile crowd, stammering through many of her lines, and vigorously plugging her book to loud boos.