After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk carried a sink into corporate offices (“Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”), declared that “comedy is now legal” (before announcing a ban on unlabeled parody accounts), and tweeted… whatever the hell this is. Musk is many things — the world’s richest person, a father of 10, the ex-partner of Grimes — but a comedian is not one of them, no matter how hard he tries to impress Nathan Fielder.
Patton Oswalt, an actually successful and talented comedian, broke down why Musk is so desperately unfunny in an interview with the Daily Beast‘s The Last Laugh podcast. “This is such an age-old story. It’s somebody who wants to be funny, and they’re not funny and not everybody can be funny. Not everybody can be a rocket scientist or a business magnate. Elon is a rocket scientist and a business magnate. Those are pretty great things, but he demands to be seen as funny and cool,” he said.
Oswalt believes that Musk sees “comedy the same way he sees money and status, whereas anyone who’s into comedy knows that comedy and [what’s] funny is constantly fluctuating.” He wants to “solve for ‘funny’ and forever be the funniest one” and “doesn’t understand that that’s not how it works in comedy.”
Musk has one thing in common with some comedians, though: he steals jokes.
You can listen to the podcast below.
(Via the Daily Beast)