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How do you roast the woman who has everything together? Seriously. Poking fun at a 40-year-old mother of three who does bicep curls in stilettos while sporting gorgeous hair and packing a gourmet lunch made by a handsome husband just seems so … impossible.

The answer on Thursday night, as Norah O’Donnell’s friends and colleagues managed “a browning toast, not like a charring,” as one producer put it, was to kill ’em with kindness.

O’Donnell, co-host of “CBS This Morning”, was being honored with punchlines (plus a fancy award) at the American News Women’s Club’s annual gala. Word on the street was that news vet Bob Schieffer, one of the night’s featured roasters, requested a guitar.

“If Luke Russert can do this, then I can!” one roaster with a wee bit of stage fright said before the program started. “Is he even 30?”

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He’s 29, actually.

As the night’s emcee, Russert (whose father, the late NBC legend Tim Russert, gave O’Donnell her start in broadcast journalism) kicked things off by calling O’Donnell’s children — twins born in 2007 and a daughter born in 2008 — Irish triplets. He joked that the worst thing about O’Donnell’s back to back pregnancies was that the rest of the world had to endure another ‘”How to lose your baby weight” story by a woman who always “looks better right after giving birth than she did before.”

And the compliments disguised as wisecracks kept coming

Susan Page, USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, said that when O’Donnell was a member of the White House press pool, it was like “Brooke Shields was attending high school with the cast of ‘Revenge of the Nerds.'”

Elizabeth Thorp, editor-in-chief of Capitol File magazine and a “mom friend” of O’Donnell’s, revealed that she’d gotten a cheeky voicemail from her gal pal that very morning. “You must be off getting Botox for tonight,” joked O’Donnell. Thorp was unfazed.

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“Only someone who’s never gotten injections would say something like that,” Thorp said. “Hello! No one gets Botox the day of an event. There’s all that bruising!”

Finally it was time for the night’s headliner. But sadly, when he stepped to the podium to recite a biographical poem written for O’Donnell that expertly rhymed “campaign” with “pain,” Schieffer was sans a guitar. Thankfully he one upped the rumors with a pair of maracas.

So how do you roast the woman who has everything? “Norah,” said Schieffer before joining a country trio set up on stage left, “what you don’t have is a theme song.”

And thus “Norah Norah Norah the Explorah” was born with a hip-shaking Schieffer on maraca one and two. Of course the crowd went wild.

“And on that note,” said Russert before closing out a night that was more toast than roast, “Bob Schieffer is playing at the Irish pub down the street. Women get in half-off.”

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