Why Everyone at the Justin Bieber Roast Sucked Up to Justin Bieber
The Justin Bieber roast finally aired Monday night, after what seemed like months of leaked jokes, clips, and photos of Bieber wearing his big-boy grown-up expression — sullen cluelessness — during the taping. It was, on one level, what we’ve come to expect from these Comedy Central telecasts: a carefully edited succession of insult jokes designed to look loose and spontaneous, delivered by comedians both professional (Kevin Hart, Jeffrey Ross, and Hannibal Buress, for example) and amateur (Martha Stewart, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ludacris, for example).
I freely admit I was thinking of writing a review saying that roasting Bieber was just an unearned excuse for the singer/public-nuisance to get more publicity without doing anything related to music. Or that this was an opportunity for him to look like a good sport while receiving kudos from celebrities who, while each at different stages of his or her careers, aspire to something in common: the kind of wealth and power Justin Bieber has, and to command Bieber-levels of media attention. Power attracts power, and it’s often not a pretty sight.
But a funny thing happened: I laughed. Quite a lot. Not very much at the Bieber jokes, a lot of which concerned his sexuality, because I’m not really into gay-panic ridicule or speculations on hermaphroditism as joke fodder.
Related: Comedy Central’s Justin Bieber Roast: The 28 Best Jokes
No, I was laughing at all the other stuff. The endlessly inventive ways of calling roast-master Kevin Hart short or not-funny. The regular arrival of a Bill Cosby joke — ostensibly because Hannibal Buress, the unlikely Paul Revere of sexual predator announcements, was on the dais, but I’ve got to believe the Cos attacks would have been made anyway, because comics can’t resist kicking a famous guy accused of creepy crimes; that he happens to be one of the all time great stand-up comics is just icing on a stale, rancid cake.
Because Bieber is already, in young adulthood, nothing more than a collection of petty crimes — against state laws and general humanity — the roast on Comedy Central quickly made him very nearly irrelevant. These broadcasts may come on all hip and daring, but they’ve remained remarkably true to their ancient source: the Friars Club roasts conducted more than half a century ago by comedians at least two generations older than the ones on TV this night. The penis jokes directed at panelist Shaquille O’Neal this evening, for example were simply updated versions of the same penis jokes directed at Milton Berle in the 1950s and ‘60s.
No one knows this better than Jeffrey Ross, the assiduously old-school insult-comic who carries the history of the Friars Club legacy in his cueball-shaped head. The Bieber roast also borrowed from another old source: the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts televised in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Those cleaned-up-for-NBC extravaganzas presented non-comics like Zsa Zsa Gabor and William Holden as joke-reciters who obviously hadn’t written any of their punchlines, and so it was at Bieber’s event, with unlikely coarse witticisms emerging from the mouths of Shaq and Martha Stewart.
In a way, all this unoriginality worked in favor of the roast Monday night. Its subject was an utterly unoriginal musical figure surrounded by performers who didn’t bother trying to be original. The best performances — by Buress, by Natasha Leggero, by Ross — were blasts of well-aimed jokes at people more powerful than they are.
In the end, Bieber took center-stage to mouth platitudes about the mistakes he’s made and to give a truculently bad impersonation of humility. His message was clear: Sure, make fun of me — but you know you still want to be as famous as me. And fame on a Justin Bieber scale, on Justin Bieber’s terms, may be the funniest, most cutting and painful, joke of all.
