When news first surfaced that MTV was bringing back its celebrity torture series Punk’d, replacing hee-hawing hat Ashton Kutcher with beatific butter sculpture Justin Bieber, many assumed that it was all just the setup for a prank that, as on the show, would then be revealed in an anticlimax of shrugging and remembering that none of this really matters. Not so, according to the New York Post: Bieber will indeed be the first of several rotating celebrity hosts on the revived show—and what's more, his duties have apparently already begun, with Bieber reportedly taping his very first prank last Friday on victim Taylor Swift, no doubt making an utter mockery of Taylor Swift’s signature street-savvy and steely resolve.
Unfortunately, “the details of the prank were not immediately known,” the Post says, leaving us free to guess what joke Bieber played to briefly upset Swift’s natural order. Perhaps he one-upped her by pretending to create a perfume that was an even more perfect distillation of preteen sexual confusion than his pal's own Wonderstruck? Or joined her on stage for a duet of his song "Baby" to pull back the curtain and reveal that their careers are interchangeable, a great cosmic joke in which their respective music is so irrelevant to their packaging that it's willingly drowned out by the unending shrieks of the children who ostensibly came to hear it? Either that or maybe he had her car towed. And then Taylor Swift would be like, “You guys, where’s my car?” and other expressions of gentle perturbation. And then Justin Bieber would come running out, shouting, “You have been punk’d, my friend!” and return her car, and then everything would quickly resolve itself for these two very nice kids, and we would all have a chaste laugh at the good, clean fun.