Could Justin Bieber be the next Justin Timberlake?
The latter turned a corner in his career when the former teenybop recording artist developed his funny side for “Saturday Night Live,” eventually hosting it four times.
In his first hosting duty Saturday, Bieber showed himself to be game for a number of sketches that played havoc with his image, yet he didn’t quite manage to establish his own confidence to hold his own as Timberlake and a number of other singers have done on the show.
In three of the sketches he played himself. In the monologue he sang love songs to women in the audience, while throwing in black history month facts; in another he reacted to having a dozen doubles (basically the whole rest of the “SNL” cast). In a third, he presented himself as s sleazy guy for Valentine’s Day.
But, knowing a bit about over-the-top fans, he played one for Miley Cyrus, in a revival of that old Vanessa Beyer sketch. In fact, a number of old sketches made their return Saturday, as the show was a showcase for Beyer and Taran Killan.
Killan was one of the better parts of a cold opening sketch that acknowledged the Super Bowl blackout, and stretched out almost as long. Beyer got to do that bit on Weekend Update in which the supposed best friend of somebody start whispering all the bad aspects of the person, in this case Richard III, in honor of his bones just having been dug up.
Other old sketches resurfacing included “The Californians” very early in the show, with Bieber fitting in as a runaway character, and the Booker T. Washington high school dance announcement sketch with Pharoh Williams’ grizzled principal at the microphone (and Bieber pretending to be co-chair of the planning committee).
To his credit, the young singer seemed more intent on acting than, say, Adam Levine, the last singer to host recently, and there seemed to be less reliance on cue cards. But he couldn’t hold a straight face in an extended Killan sketch in which he is bullied by his date’s brother (Killan), who keeps going on about some mistake he made.
If Bieber wanted to be taken seriously, despite the screaming fans in the audience (who at least seemed to have been limited in number), he did so in his musical performances, doing acoustic or slowed down ballad versions of “As Long as You Love Me” and “Nothing Like Us.”
But if he was really being taken seriously as a musician, he would have probably been invited to take part in the weekend’s Grammy ceremonies instead.