Elon Musk asked Twitter for ‘skit ideas for SNL’ and was promptly dunked on

As you may know, noted non-comedian Elon Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live this coming weekend. 

Elon Musk is funny. Not in the way, say, Gilda Radner or John Swartzwelder or Ziwe Fumudoh or Chris Fleming are funny, which is to say he is not funny because he deliberately, successfully does things that are meant to be funny. Nor is he funny in an accidental way, like Ed Balls or dogs with their lips stuck on their teeth. 

Musk is funny because his very existence is hilarious. He lives his life like a cartoon version of a tech billionaire, steals memes because he’s not funny enough to make his own, and not only tweets like a Hank Scorpio parody account run by your 14-year-old nephew in 2010 but also sometimes runs his incredibly successful businesses that way too. His idea of a funny joke is to cause significant market disruption with a tweet, inviting a securities fraud charge, which he settled and said was “worth it”. He is funny like a dad trying way too hard to vibe with his teenage daughter’s sleepover guests: his desperation to get a laugh is palpable, and when he gets one, it’ll be at him, not with him, after he leaves the room.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason people — including the cast of the show — are pissed off that he’s hosting SNL. Musk is one of the two richest people on Earth, and there is an argument to be made that it is morally repugnant to be worth multiple billions of dollars and spend it on Twitter jokes and research into impossible sci-fi missions when, as a great philosopher once said, there’s people that are dying. He’s spread COVID-19 misinformation and called stay-at-home orders “fascist”. 

So when Space Karen put out a call — on Twitter, naturally — to his legions of followers for “skit ideas”, the replies and quote tweets are equal parts Musk fanboy cringe and old-fashioned roasting.

Current and former SNL cast members corrected his terminology.

Also, Marianne Williamson joined in, leaning into her own eccentric public persona as always with a mix of self-awareness and well-meaning earnestness Musk could only dream of.

The funniest thing he could possibly do deliberately would be to display genuine self-awareness, which is impossible because if he were genuinely self-aware there is no way he would think it was a good idea for him to host SNL. 

Are these jokes? Or, put another way: Is he serious?

I genuinely can’t tell.

The show’s producers, presumably having learned from the backlash to Donald Trump’s 2016 hosting gig, will reportedly not force any cast members who object to Musk’s involvement to perform in sketches with him if they don’t want to. 

But at this point, the best case scenario is that the SNL writers and cast will register their objections through the Medium Of Comedy Itself without their controversial host even realizing it. Fingers crossed for an hour of sketches where Musk believes he’s the star, but is actually the butt of the joke. That could actually be funny.