You're fucking killing us, SNL
It’s impossible, to some degree, not to see a Saturday Night Live guest host pick as an endorsement. It’s part of what made the show’s decision to run with Donald Trump as its frontman back in 2015 so upsetting, and such a nadir for the series as a whole: At the bare minimum, the selection implies that someone high up in the show’s apparatus believes that this is what you, the viewer, want. This person is someone you’re comfortable spending 93 minutes of your Saturday night with, watching them be humanized by adjacency to comedy (if not by actually being funny themselves). To some extent, it’s a willingness to give the show over to that person’s worldview, no matter what the writers and the cast (who’ve been vocal in recent years about how much they hated the Trump appearance) might feel. If nothing else, it’s a massive platform, access to a cultural touchstone, and free rein on a widely watched TV series, no matter how much it might get complained about these days.
Anyway: Elon Musk is hosting SNL.
That’s right! Musk—best known in comedy circles for circulating Twitter memes scraped off the barrel-bottom of Reddit, and for more-or-less failing to launch his satire site Thud, despite pouring reported millions of dollars into it—is set to take the stage of Studio 8H on May 8. (Miley Cyrus is set to musical guest; we’re honestly shocked Grimes isn’t filling out the double-bill, but so it goes.) The man once heralded by the desiccated husk of Lisa Simpson as “possibly the greatest living inventor” will take on the standard monologuing duties, which we can only assume that the Security And Exchange Commission will be watching like a hawk. (Which is already several guaranteed viewers! The strategy works!)
Musk, shockingly, has yet to tweet about the news, although we can’t wait to see if he calls anyone a pedophile, or passes around COVID-19 misinformation, or is just otherwise himself while doing so. Our suspicion is that we’re going to see the well-behaved, less-online version of Musk’s pitchman persona on the show—big on space, big on vision, light on meme reposts or attacks on public transit or labor crackdowns—but, hey: If the main has a positive(ish) trait, it’s his unpredictability, so who the hell really knows.