The Justin Bieber Tour of Contrition continued this week, with a long-awaited mea culpa in the form of the newly muscled pop brat’s Comedy Central Roast. A roast is a peculiar American tradition in which you prove you are no longer an unbearable upstart who pisses in cleaners’ buckets by allowing comedians and celebrities to say truly vicious things about you in a public forum, while television viewers scour your face for approval, or upset, or any emotion that belies the dead-eyed numbness and despair that childhood fame has brought upon your life.
Bieber gamely took it on the chin from Jeff Ross, who wittily called him “a cocky little shit” and referenced that time he said he hoped Anne Frank would have been a Belieber. There were obvious jokes about his music and his young fanbase and his resemblance to a middle-aged lesbian. Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg riffed on what might happen to him when he eventually, inevitably, goes to jail. The most cutting remark came from Chris D’Elia, who delivered this knockout blow: “You literally are a guy who has it all – except for respect, love, friends, good parents and a Grammy.”
Bieber decided not to compete with the comedy world at its most savage, instead using his time to talk as yet another platform to say sorry for all that bad stuff he did, just as he has done on Instagram and Twitter.
He is so sorry that he continued to say sorry throughout the week, choosing regular haunt The Ellen Show to explain why he said sorry during his roast, and to say sorry again. He is really sorry. “I was just talking about it being a new chapter for me and, basically, saying that I’m sorry for the stuff that I’ve done,” he explained to the talkshow host, who gave him his first big break and thus started the whole thing off, for which she really should be apologising to him, and not the other way round.
Instead, Ellen invited him to play the party game Never Have I Ever with Madonna, who kept her “I Have” card facing the front at all times, because no matter how smutty the questions got, she’s Madonna, so of course she’s done everything – a quick flick through the 1992 book Sex would provide pictorial evidence of most of it. Bieber managed not to apologise for three minutes. Then Madonna marked the occasion with an Instagram selfie of Bieber pecking her on the cheek. It was captioned: “Backstage kiss from an #unapologeticbitch”.
