Saturday Night Live confused all of us recently when it announced that Elon Musk will be hosting when the show returns from hiatus next month.
This was strange because Musk is known for a lot of things—making cars that explode, making rockets that explode, pressuring his employees to work during a pandemic, pretending to invent the subway, attacking heroes after they saved a bunch of children—but comedy has never been one of them.
It appears that a good number of the show’s cast members are just as unpleasantly surprised by this announcement as the rest of us.
Shortly after the announcement was made, this season’s cast MVP Bowen Yang posted a single worried face emoji to his Instagram stories. Aidy Bryant went with a more subtle but still very obvious subtweet, reposting a tweet from Bernie Sanders about how extreme wealth inequality is a “moral obscenity.”
Aidy Bryant and Bowen Yang’s posts on their instagram stories after Elon Musk was announced as the next SNL host!!! Even the show’s cast hates him!!!!! Why didn’t they just give Miley Cyrus double duty as she deserves!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/0Ivu8BUwX6
— Georgia👑 (@Georgia39410) April 25, 2021
When Musk tweeted “Let’s find out just how live Saturday Night Live really is,” Yang also reposted it with the very excellent question: “what the fuck does this even mean?”
dying at bowen yang’s instagram stories after snl announced elon musk is hosting pic.twitter.com/6VVQ47frkR
— megan (@chaoticmlkhotel) April 25, 2021
EW noted that writer and current featured player Andrew Dismukes also weighed in, posting a picture of former longtime cast member Cheri Oteri to his Instagram story with the caption “ONLY CEO I WANT TO DO A SKETCH WITH IS CHER-E OTERI.”
In addition to the “moral obscenity” of inviting a powerful billionaire on to host the show (as if that wouldn’t be reason enough on its own), Musk has a long-established history of doing things that should 100% not be celebrated by NBC.
When a former Black employee called out Tesla for being a “hotbed for racist behavior,” including workers and even supervisors using frequent racist language and slurs, Musk’s response in an email to those employees was that they should “be thick-skinned and accept that apology.” That Black employee was also reportedly fired for “not having a positive attitude.”
Musk also served as an advisor to the Trump administration, sticking by (and even defending) Trump through his Muslim ban and anti-LGBTQIA orders, only stepping down when Trump decided to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement.
He’s also spent the entirety of the last year pushing misinformation and baseless predictions about COVID-19. (And there was that time he promised to donate thousands of ventilators to hospitals during the extreme shortage and then sent the wrong type of machine and didn’t really seem to care.)
Hey @snl this you? https://t.co/WNbz24TFp3
— Wendy Molyneux (@WendyMolyneux) April 25, 2021
After SNL let Donald Trump host in 2016 (combined with Jimmy Fallon’s infamous hair-tussling bit), NBC saw intense backlash for giving such a huge, humanizing platform to such a dangerous person. Multiple cast members have spoken out since about how uncomfortable that made them and how difficult it was to work with him. You’d think the show would have learned a lesson from that ordeal and yet here we are.
It’s so funny growing up thinking writing for SNL is the dream and then finding out all you do there is write jokes for the Richest Man on Earth, Donald Trump, Burger King, and maybe timothy chalamet if you’re lucky
— Ryan (@rysimmons) April 24, 2021
Man, May at SNL is 🔥🔥🔥! pic.twitter.com/jupNlhDwf0
— Andy Beckerman (@AndyBeckerman) April 24, 2021
(via EW, image: Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images)
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