SNL's Justin Bieber Episode: 5 Best Scenes

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Teenage girls swooned this week as Justin Bieber, apparently channeling Vanilla Ice's hair, took on double duty as host and musical guest. True to form, he swaggered and preened, but did prove willing to make fun of himself, and lost his composure in one sketch, as Taran Killam aggressively manhandled him. In a new installment of the Miley Cyrus Talk Show with Vanessa Bayer, he issued a sort-of apology for having recently been caught smoking marijuana. He perfomed "As Long as You Love Me" and "Nothing Like Us."



Some highlights...

Cold open—Super Bowl XLVII commentators James Brown (Kenan Thompson), Dan Marino (Jason Sudeikis), Bill Cowher (Tim Robinson), Shannon Sharpe (Jay Pharoah) and Steve Tasker (Taran Killam) get desperate as the Superdome power outage drags on.

The monologue—Justin Bieber dispenses roses, breathless compliments, and inaccurate Black History Month factoids to dumbfounded girls in the audience. (Also featuring a cameo by Whoopi Goldberg.)

Bravo introduces its new lineup of reality shows, from The Moroccans of Mulholland Drive to The Real Houseplants of Beverly Hills.

Corey (Kenan Thompson), the one black guy in every commercial, drops by Weekend Update.

Principal Frye (Jay Pharoah) is back and still struggling to keep order as the Booker T. Washington High School "Hurray for Abstinence" Valentine's Day dance gets underway.

Also: (Unfortunately not currently online) Justin Bieber's head of security (Jason Sudeikis) introduces Bieber to his twelve new body doubles, consisting of the entire SNL cast, male and female. (Beiber: "Some of them are black—they're not fooling anyone!" Sudeikis: "Neither are you, homeboy...")

NEXT, on February 16: Christoph Waltz, with musical guest Alabama Shakes.

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Sage Stossel is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and draws the cartoon feature "Sage, Ink." She is author/illustrator of the children's books  On the Loose in Boston and On the Loose in Washington, DC. More

On Election Day in 1996, TheAtlantic.com launched a weekly editorial cartoon feature drawn by Sage Stossel and named (aptly enough) "Sage, Ink." Since then, Stossel's whimsical work has been featured by the New York Times Week in Review, CNN Headline News, Cartoon Arts International/The New York Times Syndicate, The Boston Globe, Nieman Reports, Editorial Humor, The Provincetown Banner (for which she received a 2009 New England Press Association Award), and elsewhere. Her work has also been included in Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, (2005, 2006, 2009, and 2010 editions) and Attack of the Political Cartoonists. Her children's book, On the Loose in Boston, was published in June 2009.

Sage Stossel grew up in a suburb of Boston and attended Harvard University, where she majored in English and American Literature and Languages and did a weekly cartoon strip about college life, called "Jody," for the Harvard Crimson. From 2004 to 2007, she served as Books Editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly

After college she took what was intended to be a temporary summer position securing electronic rights to articles from The Atlantic's archive for use online. Intrigued by The Atlantic's rich history and the creative possibilities in helping to launch a digital edition of the magazine on the Web, she soon joined The Atlantic full time. As the site's former executive editor, she was involved in everything from contributing reviews, author interviews, and illustrations, to hosting message boards and producing a digital edition of The Atlantic for the Web.

Stossel lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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