Don’t Take It Seriously: Roasting the Patron in the Early Ninth Century This paper examines extended exchanges of jocular roasting (al-muhajat al-tayyiba) in the poetry and prosimetric epistles of two mid-ninth century literary circles: the circle of the vizier Ibn al-Zayyat (d. 847), and the unofficial salons of the shayatin al-ʿaskar whom Shawkat Toorawa calls the Bad Boys of Baghdad (2005). Insults in these roasts were not usually meant to offend, but rather act as a winking acceptance into the literary in-crowd. They therefore fall within Ibn Wahb’s definition of hazl as “speech from inclination not from opinion,” or in other words performative rather than denotative speech (Gelder, “Jest and Earnest,” 1992). Yet the roast nevertheless walks a fine line between offensive invective and joshing. My paper analyzes the techniques used to manage tone in these poems, including misuse of genre (parody), self-referentiality, references to other epistles and poems within the history of that literary exchange, and explicit discussions of hazl. I argue that these extended literary exchanges use many of the mu`arada techniques of the Umayyad mufakharat but insert the author in an unprecedented way, creating an influential literary device for the future of Arabic letters: an affective authorial persona, embodied and emotionally charged within the text. It is the careful management of tone in these risky roasts that demanded the development of this affective authorial persona. The paper draws on epistles and poems found in Ibn al-Zayyat’s Diwan, Zaki Safwat’s collection of epistles (1937), and Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur’s Kitab al-Manthur wal-Manzum as well as assorted other diwans and collections. I also consider theoretical comments made about the practice of roasting in treatments of epistolography from the following century (the tenth century), in works such as Qudama b. Ja`far, Jawahir al-Alfaz; al-Nahhas, Kitab `Umdat al-Kuttab; Ibn Wahb, al-Burhan fi Wujuh al-Bayan; and Abu Hilal al-`Askari, Kitab al-Sina`atayn.