Fly me to Mars, I guess.
Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live on May 8, 2021. Here’s what I think about it.
It is officially time to recognize that Saturday Night Live is no longer radical or even satiric comedy. The latest episode, airing May 8th, was as out of touch with the average American as Kim Kardashian’s 40th birthday island rental.
Elon Musk, the soon-to-be overlord of the Mars colony, was host. I think that alone says enough about the “anti-establishment attitude” of SNL (Although I do hope you get your seat on the plane to Mars, Lorne Michaels!). Musk was partnered with former Disney queen Miley Cyrus, who recently released an album showing she has finally reached the acceptance stage of her anti-establishment grief. However, rather than continuing to rebel against the system, it seems that she has sunken into fully embracing it. She’s partnered now with The Kid Laroi, a man who is not-so-subtly likely abusive to women. The first verse of his hit song “Without You” goes as follows:
“I can’t believe that you would up and leave me/Fuck all of your reasons/I lost my shit, you know I didn’t mean it.”
Then going on to call the object of his “affection” a “ho” in the catchy pop chorus, The Kid Laroi exemplifies the modern “soft boy/e-boy” persona popular on TikTok. This song is the hallmark of a disturbing trend of abusive narratives being normalized on social media as relationship ideals and, thanks to Miley, reached #23 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. I guess that Miley was trying to boost an internet star into validity due to the success of Lil Nas X, whose country song was validated in the industry when Billy Ray Cyrus collaborated on a remix. However, Billy Ray picked Lil Nas X, a black kid from a small town within the broader Atlanta urban sprawl. Miley picked a mediocre white guy from Australia. Again, she falls short of using her platform for good despite another misguided attempt.
Although the combination of Musk, Miley, and the Kid Laroi may seem unexpected, if you take a second look, it brings in important new audiences. Tech bros and conspiracy theorists follow Musk, while Gen Z TikTokers follow The Kid Laroi and Cyrus. Additionally, Musk and Cyrus both have a penchant for public controversies, which always attracts media attention. At SNL, past controversial hosts have historically boosted viewership. In 2015, Donald Trump’s appearance as host attracted the attention of 9.7 million viewers, nearly 3 million more than the previous season’s most successful show.
With the controversial host and musical duo, Michaels got his ratings boost and Musk got his platform to normalizing him from the faraway richest man in the world to just a guy making jokes. A win-win for both bourgeois men! And if you ask how Miley benefits from all this, I think her social media hashtag #MileyToTheMoon summarizes it pretty succinctly.
Michael Che hit the point home during the Weekend Update when he asked “why are all these rich white people going to space?”. As climate change continues to happen at an accelerated rate, it appears that many billionaires (soon to be trillionaires) are working hard at putting a plan in place. Aside from Musk, the flashiest of the bunch, both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have also announced their own commercial space flight ventures. For those unfamiliar with the name Richard Branson, he is the founder of the Virgin Group, a UK conglomerate with over 400 worldwide companies in their profile. Bezo’s initiative, Blue Origin, recently challenged the contract awarded to SpaceX by NASA to facilitate easier returns to the moon for astronauts. Virgin Galactica, Branson’s Venture, publicly unveiled their “first” spaceship in their intergalactic fleet on March 30. The elite race to escape Earth is upon us, which could have broader implications that the billionaire class no longer intends to invest in the dying infrastructure of our home planet.
Anyways, to pivot away from the existential dread that I feel every time I think about the impending doom of our planet and get back to the SNL episode, Elon Musk announced during his opening speech that he is “the first host with Asperger’s… or at least the first to admit it.” While this is simply untrue, as previous cast member (and beloved Ghostbuster) Dan Aykroyd has been open about his diagnosis in the 1980s for years, it poses potential problems for those who identify themselves as being on the autism spectrum. To begin with, Asperger’s is no longer used as a diagnosis after its removal from the DSM in 2013. Further, Asperger’s has been used as a term that means “high functioning autism” for decades. With this mindset, children with Asperger’s diagnosis receive less institutional help than those who are diagnosed with Autism, which further alienates both groups, as those with Asperger’s go without help and those with Autism are considered less socially compatible, a harmful narrative. Even further, Hans Asperger, the titular “expert” of the disorder, conducted research and published reports that were inseparable from his own Nazi ideology. The name “Asperger’s” is widely considered to be out of date and can be downright harmful to individuals with Autism. Musk had an opportunity to provide representation for those on the spectrum and chose to gloss over the more painful points surrounding representation issues.
Elon Musk’s diagnosis also has the potential to perpetuate harmful stereotypes associated with the Autism spectrum and help justify his own malicious enterprises. The massive underrepresentation of the community culminates in an infantilization effect, preventing adults with autism from receiving the support and acceptance they need to be successful. 90% of the media representation for Autism are characters that are children, and many of the adults are dismissed as having “a childlike mind.” The other side of the spectrum, the savants, are overrepresented (see Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman). While savants do exist, such as essayist Daniel Tammet, they represent less than 10% of the entire community. The current media representation of the autism spectrum creates stereotypes that either cast autistic adults as either child-like or geniuses. Both of these stereotypes can be harmful to the community, as they erase the majority of the population. The stigma of the community is best shown in the behavior of those who infantilize those with Autism, switching to baby-talk or assuming that those with the disorder are unable to understand them. This harmful behavior is shown in the SNL episode, with Cecily Strong’s old-timey prostitute telling Beck Bennett’s character that “it’s fine [that he said she probably had syphilis] because he’s eccentric.” Eccentric sounds a whole lot like infantilization to me, but maybe I’m reading too much into it. Regardless, the possibility of infantilizing Elon Musk has horrifying implications, as he is, on many counts, perpetuating harmful narratives to his capitalistic sycophants. A few examples are his dismissal of COVID, his criticism of public transportation, and his anti-union beliefs. This rich, selfish man has full awareness of what he’s doing. Don’t allow him or these pervasive stereotypes to convince you otherwise.
SNL is a great tool for popular culture figures to use so that they can “connect” with the average citizen through “funny” sketches. Musk attempted to capitalize on humor throughout the show to distract from his dastardly deeds, making jokes about Dogecoin, his outlandish tunnel network proposal, and even playing himself in a fanfiction-esque Mars colony sketch. In the Mars sketch, the grandiose intentions of Musk are revealed; when Pete Davidson’s “Chad” saves the Mars colony from imminent doom, it is broadcast on screens in major cities all around the world. Musk is intentionally trying to further his narrative of becoming a central figure in history and we all sit and watch, listening to the audience laugh at sketches that showcase just how far the American Dream has fallen.
Beyond just the controversy surrounding Musk, this episode was rife with out-of-touch jokes, written to please the corporations that pay for ad time. The most obvious influence throughout the episode was Disney, which was featured three separate times on the Weekend Update, with a mention of the park reopening, dismissal of some (albeit farfetched) drama of the Snow White ride, and Ego Nwodin’s Disney Mom character. While I thought it was strange that they didn’t touch on the bizarre phenomenon of Disney Adults, this was soon explained by some quick research into the advertising spend on SNL. In 2020, three of the top brand advertisers (ranked by attention score) were owned by Disney; Searchlight Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, and Disney+ all were less likely than the average commercial to be interrupted. To qualify for this list, there had to be an advertising spend of at least $100,000.
The decision to allow Elon Musk to host Saturday Night Live was a poor one, but no doubt inspired by the capitalistic greed of the show. The cast members, some of who were once average Americans but now make at least $150,000 a season, are emblematic of this. Pete Davidson recently appeared on Seth Meyer’s show to discuss a range of topics, but the most troubling was that he just “didn’t get” the controversy surrounding Elon Musk, continuing on to say that “[Musk]’s just a wealthy businessman that makes, like, nerd sh*t.” This nerd sh*t may destroy us all. The amount of carbon dioxide and space debris that the SpaceX rockets have and will continue to release has severe environmental impacts. I guess it doesn’t matter to Pete — his Staten Island home won’t be underwater until 2100 and he’ll probably be dead by then.
