According to Chevy Chase, he was truly shocked and hurt by the comments directed at him in the roast. Chase knew he had burned some bridges over the years, especially among his former SNL co-stars, but was unaware just how much his peers had come to despise him as a result of his past behavior. As soon as the roast was over, Chase went straight to his hotel room and sobbed the entire night, sinking into a depression while Paul Shaffer comforted him.
This roast was particularly infamous because the jokes directed at Chevy Chase were especially pointed and mean-spirited, even by the standards of a roast.
Last Friars Club Roast to air on Comedy Central. All following roasts on the network are tagged "The Comedy Central Roast".
A main reason the roast ended up being a complete disaster is that Chevy Chase was furious when very few of his costars whom he'd been friends with agreed to show up (unlike the 1997 roast of him, which went well for all parties) and he didn't know the comedians who did sign up for the show and didn't meet with them before the show (the producers failed to arrange any such event, and the scattered efforts that some of the comics made to sit down with Chevy were entirely refused by him) which led to more viciousness from strangers than the roast was designed to handle.
Comedy Central never aired the roast again after its original 2002 broadcast. The network felt it was so painful and unfunny that they didn't want to be associated with it. The show's debacle also sped up Comedy Central's plans to stop working with the Friars Club(s) and to simply produce future roasts by themselves.