I am a 41 year old straight non-pedophile so I couldn’t tell you much about Justin Bieber except what I stumble across in the news inadvertently but I noticed he had a recent Comedy Central Roast posted on YouTube and decided to watch. Their Roasts can range from really great to mediocre but are generally somewhat entertaining. This one was more on the mediocre side but I did appreciate the sentiment. Bieber did it as a publicity stunt due to his failing public image and being ranked below Kim Jong Un as one of the most hated people in the world but it appears to be a sincere move to move beyond his past behavior and finally grow up. Everyone from Shaq to Martha Stewart roasted the hell out of him.
For me, Martha Stewart was the main highlight. I had no idea she could should be really funny, dirty and take prison jokes from the others with the best of them. The rest of the ensemble was uneven except for talented professional comedians like Natasha Leggero (always one of my favorites).
However, Bieber did make a somewhat convincing apology speech to the whole world at the end promising to become more mature and stop doing stupid things. I almost felt sorry for him just a little.
My standards must be lower than yours as I found it to be funny as hell, especially Natasha Leggero. Shaq and Snoop were the least funny, and apparently there were a number of Paul Walker jokes that were edited out by Comedy Central.
My two favorite quips came at the expense of Selena Gomez:
“… sleeping with Justin made her (Gomez) the most tragic ‘Selena’ ever in entertainment.”
“… sleeping with Justin showed, again, that Mexicans will do a job that Americans just won’t do.”
Don’t get me wrong, I did like it. It just wasn’t one of the best Roasts I have ever seen. I hold Comedy Central Roasts to a higher standard than most other special events and this one came in well enough but it didn’t blow me away. The examples of quips you gave were good and there were lots of others like it. I still like Martha Stewart the best. Her self-deprecating humor that went completely against her normal persona was not expected and hilarious (she talks about how, when she first went to prison, she carefully made a craft out of some bubblegum paper and then shanked the biggest bull-dyke she could find with it to prove her street cred among other things). Natasha Leggero is one of my favorite comedians in general so I expected her to do well.
A scripted publicity stunt, his antics were from a year or so ago. He does not need to apologize it is fake. He was not even in the news lately, so this is all a set up.
Just make music and act normal and his image would improve. Why apologize for long ago happenings?
But no he needs that attention, forget his work and acting normal, he is an attention hog.
Don’t see why you need to mention not being a pedophile or gay, even if you were into him he would not be a pedo, Justin is 21 and while it is young he is a grown ass man . Not a kid at all!
I laughed really hard, a lot. But it didn’t really feel like a roast of Justin Bieber. Most of the people there had nothing to say about Bieber, not even the few who know him.
Definitely a publicity stunt. But it was funny as hell!
Some celebs coast by on their work, others can’t live without attention. Bieber is nothing without attention. Why not release new music? Why shallow attention?
I thought it was really funny, but ultimately it felt just like “another” celebrity roast.
William Shatner, Gene Simmons - those guys really “needed” “deflating,” (both in quotes because their reputations are as inflated egos, and because they both seem pretty self-aware of their celebrity being based on their huge sense of self-worth, and they both seem to have senses of humor.
This just felt they were looking for somebody to roast, rather than somebody who needed roasting.
Still (is it obvious I watch most of these?), better than the James Franco roast, and Comedy Central really delivers on “dangerous” humor in these things. Speaking truth to power.’
Besides the outrageous crack about Selena Gomez being the most tragic Selena in the entertainment industry, I also nearly woke the household when I laughed embarrassingly loudly at Snoop looking “like a retired WNBA player.”
And those it was cheap, I laughed hard (sorry, Kevin Hart) at Hart getting a job playing Peter Dinklage’s shadow in the next season of “Game of Thrones.”
He was 12 when he scored fame and didn’t seem to mature much beyond that mindset in the intervening years. I can’t fault him for his early success but his target demographic has always been the young teens.
No, he is not grown man at all by his own admission but for very understandable reasons. Call me an optimist, but I actually believed his apology to the world and hope that he uses his talent and money to do much better things in the future.
Going on a Comedy Central Roast is voluntary so I hope that was the first step in a successful intervention. I don’t want to see any people with talent crash and burn early when they can recreate themselves and have something to offer the world.
I am pretty sure you are gay but that is just incidental to this topic. I have never displayed any prejudice against gay people on this board because I don’t think that way. Maybe my line about gay people and pedophiles was misplaced in general but I have heard both groups make illicit statements about him Daniel Craig and others. Then again, there were also the people doing the countdown until the Olsen twins turned 18. Ick to all of them. There are skeevy people of all persuasions that make such comments.
Perhaps the humor fell flat but all of my exposure to Justin Beiber prior to his roast and various news stories was from little girl’s parties courtesy of my daughters. My own daughters always hated him but some of their friends were all about that from posters to imitation dance routines. It gets to be a little much for a suburban father sometimes.
It turns out, maybe the kid did listen at least a little.
The old time Friar’s roasts were all about who could do the best variant on a small set of jokes. Stinginess for Jack Benny. Huge penis for Milton Berle. The modern Comedy Central roasts are … all about who can do the best variant on a small set of jokes.
If that’s what you watch for, then they have a lot to offer. This was nowhere near the best, but it had a lot of great one-liners.
How can you beat one-liners to death? It’s like saying: I saw a comedian last year, why do I need to see another? It’s been 18 months since the roast of James Franco. They need to do more roasts, not fewer.
Taking any part of it seriously for even a second is … wrong. It’s like taking Coca-Cola’s twitter account seriously.
Perhaps I should have made my apology more direct. I truly have no prejudiced towards gay people at all. I also don’t believe that gay = pedophile or anything of the sort. I make casual jokes sometimes about gay people because I have lots of gay friends but I didn’t pay attention to the unintentional association that may offend some people. I have no use for pedophiles and I didn’t intend to make any association between the groups.
However, the fact remains that I am neither gay nor a pedophile and I still thought the Roast of Justin Bieber was moderately good.
I’m with you; it was a really funny roast. Among the most shocking jokes: Pete Davidson - whose dad was a firefighter who died in the 9/11 attacks - made a crack about the movie “Soul Plane” being “the worst experience of my life involving a plane.” Someone else followed it up with a joke about Snoop-Dogg inhaling more smoke than Pete Davidson’s dad did on 9/11.
I’m amazed when they manage to book elderly women who have a refined/classy public persona - and then they not only sit through the performance, but they give as good as they get. Nichelle Nichols and Martha Stewart are two who come immediately to mind.
I love all the Comedy Central roasts - the panel of roasters usually tell some pretty hilarious jokes. I miss Lisa Lampanelli, she was the best out of all of them.
This one was pretty funny. Joke of the night for me : “Kevin Hart is so short, he goes home at night and goes ‘up’ on his wife.”
“We Are the World 25” was released in 2010, five years ago. Against my better judgement, I watched the television premiere of it. At the very beginning, I saw a seven-year old boy, identified as Justin Bieber, singing into some sort of Auto-tuner device.
It is now 2015.
Roasts are hilariously filthy insult-fests that take place late at night in Friars Clubs.
I really liked the line “all these rappers, and Martha Stewart is the one who has done the most jail time”. I’m sure it was scripted on both sides - so what? It’s entertainment.