Justin Bieber’s roast, for all its hysterical and wildly inappropriate racial, sexual, bodily and bestial jokes, came with much higher stakes than the 13 others that Comedy Central has hosted before it…combined.
Here was a chance for a young man — just turned 21 — to lance the boil of his toxic public image, to show the world that he could take a joke, and maybe tell a few himself. We expected a merciless probing of Bieber’s blunders via zingers that would never fly outside of the context of a roast, the last safe place for celebrities to say wickedly vicious things about one another.
But what we didn’t expect from the bad-boy pop star everyone hates to hate was an apology. A sincere, heartfelt apology. And as long as Bieber stays true to his promise that he’s a changed man, it just may have worked.
Bieber graciously endured five hours of the live show, sitting front and center onstage at the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, California, while host Kevin Hart and roasters Pete Davidson, Shaquille O’Neal, Ludacris, Natasha Leggero, Chris D’Elia, Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart, Jeffrey Ross, Hannibal Buress and Ron Burgundy, in a surprise appearance, took turns firing sharp barbs at Bieber.
