Funnyman Musk

On Elon's comedic stylings -- with digressions into film and humor theory.

Extremely Hardcore Humor: Adriaen Brouwer “Youth Making a Face,” c. 1632.

While everyone is outraged at the Democratic party, sitting on its hands during a GOP-enabled coup, I'm possibly more dismayed by our American comic community. Why, after all this time, hasn't anyone come forward with what this moment surely calls for, a deft, fully-realized, uncannily accurate impersonation of Elon Musk?

I know that Dana Carvey took a half-hearted swipe at it on SNL, landing somewhere between Hans, Franz, and the Church Lady. Some TikTok comics have made valiant efforts, and there may be others I’ve simply missed. But given that the man is a walking, talking version of some late-90s Mike Meyers character, I don’t understand why some real heavyweight hasn’t gotten him down by this time.

It's the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable. He’s such an awkward man, so full of ticks, so manifestly uncomfortable in his own skin, so desperate to be considered cool and so unique in his self-presentation — the very definition of imitable. His complex speech pathology mixes Cecil Rhodes, Russell Crowe, Simple Jack — per Carvey’s diagnosis “South Africa via Canada, via Pennsylvania … a little bit of Australian in there, a little bit of British.” And it represents someone who’s put an inconceivable amount of money and energy towards remaking society so that it thinks he’s cool and funny.

I get that it wouldn’t be a labor of love for most these comics, “doing” Elon Musk. The most gifted impressionists, like Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, or Melissa Villaseñor, seem to work from an amused fascination or even affection for their subject, knowing that Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Owen Wilson, or Nicolas Cage remain undamaged by their treatment. Peter Sellers was probably a different case, since his extremely uncanny impressions had a tinge of of sociopathy to them.

We also can’t discount the fear factor, especially now. Not only is this man world-historically over-empowered but he’s so easily wounded that making fun of him gets you kicked off the platform that he bought, if not vilified, doxxed, and/or killed. Don’t you miss the days of all-caps complaints about the “failing, unfunny” SNL? And as with his silent partner in the White House, a proven willingness to inflict pain, lies, and terror on the vulnerable blunts the funniness of even the most ridiculous person.

Maybe it’s taste, self-restraint, the professional pride that makes most comics recoil from cheap shots against people with disabilities. Maybe our great mimics might feel cowed by Musk pulling the neuroatypical get-out-of-infamy-free card. In which case I’d suggest that obscene wealth boggles the standard calculus around what is and isn’t cheap.

​​This is not an exhortation to defeat well-funded, deadly serious fascists by making fun of them. For actual insights into such matters I heed the counsel of informed democracy fans like Anand Giridharadas and Paul Krugman, follow Wired's insider reporting, track the sober realpolitik of Bloomberg and Financial Times, endorse the informed commentary of John Ganz, NYT opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, and the smart, humane podcasters of Know Your Enemy.

I'll repeat the standard advice: invest in local community, protect the vulnerable, following the tips for surviving autocracy from Masha Gessen shared back in the day, and while it's probably de rigueur to shout out bestselling fascist scholar Timothy Snyder here, I don't advise following him too closely unless you want to have to change your drawers after every piece.

But I’ve spent this past week puzzling over this man’s Steve Jobs-ish comedy distortion field, wondering just how compartmentalized his deformity is, and I’m still not clear on how to react to what he says and does. Last month, just before setting out to destroy our government, Musk was busted for doing something almost incomprehensibly lame: hiring hardcore players of a new online game to play for him and claiming to have a world-beating score himself.

Now that is fucking hilarious. Most of us would have to mainline ketamine for months before coming up with a superlative horse’s-ass move like that.

But is this kind of thing a funny quirk of an otherwise towering neuroatypical genius? Or is it constitutive? Is Musk’s innate hilariousness one telling part of a current hard-right Gestalt that, as political writer John Ganz put it on the KYE podcast, “has a fundamentally misguided, deformed, degraded conception of human beings and institutions, the state, and society reflected in every part of what they do.”

One of the cruelest and most confounding ironies of our moment is that two of the most vile and powerful humans on the planet happen to be pretty funny. Admittedly, all the death and human misery takes some of the fun out of the otherwise killer material that came out of the White House this week, but still: A guy who portrayed a successful realty developer on TV then ran for president as an isolationist suddenly announces his plan to drive the rabble out of Gaza and replace them with luxury condos? While the mouths of his staff all hang open? That’s gold!

And as much as we hate to admit it, Trump used to get off some good lines back in the day. While I can only recall one right now, it feels paradigmatic of the nasty borscht-belt style he commanded as an entertainer and tabloid fixture: when Howard Stern asked him what he'd do if his wife were disfigured in a horrible accident, he responded, "How’re the breasts?" 

Any comic would have to call that solid: ironic, edgy, off-the-cuff, self-aware. This is the kind of funny DJT could be before politics scrambled the remainder of his brain and Silicon Valley helped install him as figurehead of this unique version of autocracy. (Autocrazy? Auto-cray-cray?) The main difference between DJT and funnyman Elon Musk is that Trump was sometimes funny on purpose.

If Musk weren’t so prodigiously malevolent, he’d be one of the funniest people of the decade. His real superpower, unmentioned in Walter Isaacson's deadly–sounding biography or any other profile I've read, is the ability to be funny while doing something deadly and deadly while doing something funny. Or rather “funny.”

Not deadly in the comic usage of slaying, killing, murdering, but in the criminal justice sense. As in a menace to comic society. A serial killer of humor itself. What Musk does, what comes out of him whenever he steps into a comedic valence, isn’t eye-rolling or groan-inducing so much as bone-chilling.

In 2022, the NYT gave us a harrowing glimpse into the comedic ambitions of this billionaire “who is known to halt meetings in order to watch ‘Monty Python’ clips, has made a habit of socially cultivating buzzy comedians and comic entertainers,” and who, per an unnamed comedy writer, has “a deep-seated need to be recognized as funny.”

One of the luckless comedians to attract his attention was the Canadian deadpan artist Nathan Fielder, whose Comedy Central satire of American entrepreneurs, “Nathan For You,” followed its title character’s attempt to market poop-flavored frozen yogurt and Holocaust-awareness athleisure, and whose appeal to Musk is, I assume, an especially byzantine form or sublimated aggression or projection. 

In 2019, Musk attempted to buy The Onion, then tried to poach some of its writers for an unsuccessful bid for his own satirical website, the aptly named Thud. The Onion responded by Tweeting on X "Elon Musk Offering $1.2 Billion in Grants to Any Project That Promises To Make Him Feel Complete.” 

This is where that old Martin Amis observation has never been more relevant. “A sense of humor is a serious business,” he wrote in The War Against Cliche. “And it isn't funny, not having one.”

Watch the humorless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humorless can program themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick — and that's about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally 'challenged', as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humor). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humorless have no idea what is going on and can't make sense of anything at all.

A chilling example of this occurred three years ago in San Francisco, in that moment when, after his court-mandated purchase of Twitter, Musk marked his arrival at the company’s HQ with a bit of prop-comedy so dumb, so grasping, and so obscurely reasoned that I’ve often been tempted to reverse engineer the joke, to get a sense of just what R&D goes into this kind of product launch.

Engineering’s step one is: identify the problem. The employees need to know that I’ve arrived, that I’m actually their boss.

Step two: propose a solution. I’ll make a public appearance, demonstrate involvement with my physical presence at the site.

Step three: adapt solution to use-case. Well, this is a social-media company where people trade quips, so I should probably be somewhat witty. Yeah, find some clever way to help it sink in that I’m their boss.

Sink in, sink in… 

…!

Tweet: “Entering Twitter HQ – Let that sink in.”

This is just one item in the rap sheet of humor’s Public Enemy No. 1. 

In April of 2023, Musk told followers of the newly-named X that he’d painted over the "W" on Twitter’s sign so it read “Titter.” Like tits! This, two years after tweeting about his plan for a university called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science, whose acronym would be TITS. 

Last year, when Tesla introduced long-awaited software that enables the driver to summon a semi-self-driving car to their location, some theorized that the delay was likely due to laborious refining of its brand name, Actually Smart Summon, so that the CEO could tweet “S3XY getting that ASS.” 

While I’m just throwing in a few of the online jokes that don’t use hate speech, I'm struck by how well they’d fit in with my son’s seventh-grade group chats — their explosive reactions to any appearance of the stoner-slang number “420” or the sexual reference number “69.” Musk once tweeted that his birthday is 69 days after 4/20. Amis again: “Puns are cues or triggers to the humorless, and double puns are obviously twice as funny as single ones.”

Imagine that you’re someone with “a deep-seated need to be recognized as funny,” per the unnamed comedian in the NYT piece. Now, imagine you’re trying to fulfill that need with wisecracks like the above, which are too juvenile to be dad jokes and too leaden to be juvenile. (What’s their genre — führer jokes?) Could this tragic condition be the genesis of the world-class villain now threatening humanity and giving a Butt-Head chortle? 

In a recent interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, longtime Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher discusses the youthful aids Musk has long surrounded himself with, most recently to hack into private government databases. 

"He has people around him that are just enablers,” she says. “They're all lesser than he is in some fashion and they all look up to him. They're typically younger.” 

They also tend to self-select for shared interests like white supremacy, and, of course: “They laugh at his jokes." 

"Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he [says], 'People around me thought it was funny.’... When he was being interviewed at Code once, he had a couple of them there and he told a really bad joke and they all went, 'Huh-huh-huh!'And I was like, I'm sorry, Did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads.”

In the Coen Brothers' expert Capra/Sturges pastiche The Hudsucker Proxy, the conspiring execs of Hudsucker Industries promote a mailroom stooge Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) to CEO in a plot to sink the price of company shares so that they can buy a controlling interest.

In the relevant scene, Barnes reclines in his luxurious office surrounded by staff assigned to keep his genius productive: a small chamber orchestra plays "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," one uniformed woman manicures his nails while another massages his temples, a tailor pins up his pants cuffs, a sculptor in smock and beret squints at him and chisels his likeness into a block of marble, and — per the screenplay: "A GOON sits off to one side, hat insolently atop his head, reading the funny papers." 

This last person's role becomes clear in the scene, when Norville cracks a weak joke and the GOON explodes into uproarious laughter. At this point, the amount of money in Musk’s goon fund must exceed the GDP of several nations.

Hilarity upgrade: EM shared this doctored image of himself on X after the election. And it’s twice as funny.

Henri Bergson perceived indifference as being essential to laughter, that it requires a certain detachment from feelings and affect, if not real-world effects. He also pointed to laughter’s social function, to how hard it is to laugh along with a group one feels excluded from. Was Musk’s comic engine effed at birth? Did life make him feel excluded from the joke, or from humanity in general?

I considered this when I read Billy Bragg’s observation that “the richest man in the world, who could have anything he wanted, go anywhere he wished, and do whatever took his fancy, spends his weekend depriving the poorest people in the world of food and healthcare, then boasts about it on his dumb app.

He screencaps the X post: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead." 

You can almost hear the horse-faced, pressured-speech laugh he made when posting this.

Maybe there’s less here than meets the eye. Maybe the apt film reference isn’t the Coen Brothers but Armano Iannucci’s 2009 political satire In the Loop. I’m thinking of an observation made by Malcolm Tucker, the floridly foul-mouthed fixer for the British PM, when he comes up against an American State Department figure, a cross between Donald Rumsfeld and a fundamentalist Christian backbencher, someone who’s intent on pushing their nations into bloody war but insists that others verbally censor their profanity in his presence by speaking the stars in, say, F*CK.

After the two men conclude some world-historically dirty business, and are about to part. Tucker gives the man a long, fascinated look and delivers his final verdict. 

“You know, I’ve met some psychos in my time,” he says. “But none as fucking boring as you.”

Then he catches himself. 

“Oh sorry, that’s right. You disapprove of swearing,” he says, then fine-tunes his diagnosis: “One boring F-star-star-CUNT.”