They’re troll-ing him.
Justin Timberlake performed his new track, “Selfish,” on “Saturday Night Live” as die-hard Britney Spears fans have sent her 2011 single “Selfish” to the top of the iTunes charts.
Timberlake — who has not appeared on “SNL” in over a decade — sang “Selfish” and debuted “Sanctified” off his forthcoming sixth studio album, “Everything I Thought It Was,” after being introduced by his longtime friend, Jimmy Fallon, who made several cameos throughout Saturday’s show.
Host Dakota Johnson, 34, joked that Timberlake’s appearance on the sketch comedy show was the start of his “comeback.”
“I’m so happy you chose my show for your comeback,” Johnson told the singer, 42, after he playfully interrupted her opening monologue.
“Comeback, is that what we’re calling it?” replied Timberlake, before Johnson added that she “meant that in a good way.”
“OK, I see what this is. This is where we make a joke like, ‘First, he was bringing sexy back, and now he’s bringing coming back,’” Timberlake said.
Timberlake’s performance of “Selfish,” which was released last week along with an announcement of a new tour, comes shortly after Spears fans caused her song of the same name to skyrocket into the iTunes Top Forty on Friday.
The Spears fan account BritneyxYtube told Entertainment Weekly that this all “started as a joke.”
“Then we all joined in, saying that Britney Spears was coming back with a ‘brand’ new song,” a person behind the fan account explained. “I still can’t believe that it became so big, and we see the results we see now. We are all so happy to see her song making a comeback after all these years!”
“Britney Army level of pettiness deserves to be praised,” one fan posted on X.
“Britney has the funniest fanbase,” another wrote.
One supporter also hoped that the revival of the tune would convince Spears, 42, to return to music despite the “Toxic” singer recently announcing on Instagram that “I will never return to the music industry!!!”
Timberlake, meanwhile, has been under fire from Spears’ fans since she made several bombshell accusations against her former *NSYNC boyfriend in her October memoir “The Woman in Me.”
She alleged that the “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” singer, whom she dated from 1999 to 2002, cheated on her and pressured her into getting an abortion when she wouldn’t have made that choice “if it had been let up to me.”
“I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” wrote the singer. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
“I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I don’t know if that was the right decision,” Spears, who recently separated from her 29-year-old hubby Sam Asghari, continued. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Timberlake, who married actress Jessica Biel in 2012, has yet to officially comment on Spears’ allegations.
