There is something faintly tragic about Elon Musk at this point.
Perhaps the clearest thing about the world’s richest man is that he so desperately wants people to think he’s funny. He announced with a flourish that “comedy is now legal on Twitter” once his purchase of the platform was complete. And then there was that time he turned up at headquarters carrying a sink.
The lifted memes, the empty edge-lord provocations — combined with the fact that when people make jokes at his expense he suspends their accounts — have always elicited the whole-body-tensing-inducing embarrassment of watching someone fail an audition.
And that was before he got on stage with a high-profile stand-up comedian. Of course it was Dave Chappelle, whose work has largely morphed in recent years into that of a fairly dull outrage merchant, a figurehead for people who argue they’re just centrist freedom lovers with common sense and a great sense of humour, but weirdly only seem to get particularly exercised by trans people. The only surprise is that Ricky Gervais wasn’t there too on Sunday night in San Francisco.
“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle yelled to the crowd of about 18,000.
The crowd cheered and then, to Musk and Chapelle’s surprise, viciously booed.
“Controversy, buddy,” Chappelle said, as the boos continued. “Weren’t expecting this, were you?”
The whole saga was probably best summed up by an exchange on Musk’s “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” thread. The initial “joke” was a terminally online right-winger twofer: a swipe at trans and non-binary people and a stoking of conspiratorial thinking regarding COVID, which also doubled as a desperate call for attention from both leftie scolds and far-right trolls.
After the predictable ratio, Musk said “Truth resonates … ” because, as with the comedy he likes, the fact that people don’t like something is always a sign you’re making an extremely good point. A user replied with something actually funny (“So does a crowd full of boos”). Musk then made it clear he didn’t care that people booed, and it wasn’t that many, really, and if anything he found it funny:
Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter). It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.
