Saturday Night Live: Elon saves a Sinking Ship
Elon Musk and Miley Cyrus hosted this week's Saturday Night Live with focus on the Memes, Mars and of course DogeCoin
We write a daily newsletter on all things Music, and the Business and Tech behind it. If you’d like to get it directly in your inbox, subscribe now!
What’s good, everyone?
This weekend’s Saturday Night Live, in its 46th season now, saw Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk co-host the show with Miley Cyrus amidst much controversy in the run-up to the event.
Musk appeared to have broken the golden rule of keeping SNL sketches or skits under tight wraps before the show airs, by going on Twitter and trying to elicit ideas for the skits.
Naturally, most of the suggestions revolved around Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has been pumping for quite a few months now, and saw its value increase by a staggering 26,000% in the past 6 months, hitting an all-time high of around 70 cents for a coin before the show aired on Saturday night.
However, the show opened on a different note, starting with a monologue by Musk, where he spoke about how he was the first host of the SNL with Asperger’s Syndrome, a disorder that prevents people from communicating or socializing normally. This was the first time Musk admitted this publicly, having been ridiculed often times for his weird way of talking.
He went on to talk about his vision for the future- how he believed in renewable energy and humans being a space-faring civilization, along with justifying his cryptic tweets and smoking pot on podcasts, for which Musk has landed in trouble with the SEC previously.
It was an entertaining monologue complete with dark but hilarious OJ Simpson jokes, which ended with Musk inviting his mother: nutritionist and model- Maye Musk on stage, and the pair reminiscing about Elon as a child growing up in South Africa. It was an endearing bit on the eve of Mother’s day.
The skits revolved around various topics, ranging from Elon as a Mario character: Wario, in a fake courtroom accusing Princess Peach of cheating on him- played by his girlfriend and singer Grimes; to him as the ‘DogeFather’ acting as an expert on DogeCoin on an investment channel. It made for hilarious viewing seeing the richest man on the planet dressed as a Mario Character.
As the ‘DogeFather’, Elon tried to explain in vain what DogeCoin really was to the news channel anchors, but after multiple failed attempts, settled to call the cryptocurrency as yet another, ‘Hustle’. His words seemed to have effects on the price of DogeCoin, with the price dropping a staggering 30% immediately, incredibly volatile, even for a cryptocurrency.
Other bits saw him as a doctor with a beard, attending to a young patient with ‘woke’ friends, as a cowboy raiding a saloon, a creepy priest in a murder detective show, an Icelandic TV producer, and a normal guy struggling to socialize at parties in a post quarantine and covid world.
My favorite? The Astronaut.
If someone had to bet on a plausible scenario in one of Space X’s offices in the future, this sketch seemed to have covered that in a hilarious manner. It saw regular SNL cast member and comedian Pete Davidson, play ‘Chad’ as of the colonists of Mars, sometime in the future, trying to save humanity from a fatal accident on the red planet, and eventually getting himself killed in the most ‘Chad’ manner possible. It also saw Miley Cyrus playing one of the colonists, and truly made the entire show worth it. It is honestly one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time, check it out here 👇🏻
In other performances, Miley Cyrus and a 17-year old Australian rapper who goes by the name of ‘The Kid Laroi’ performed a remix of Laroi’s single- Without You for the first time in public. Miley also showcased her Rock and Roll side with her single Plastic Trees from her 2020 album, and it made for a perfect end to an exhilarating show, and possibly the best SNL episode in over a decade.
However, as they say, it isn’t possible to please everyone. Not everyone saw the humor in Elon’s sketches, with a majority of them (read liberal media) probably biased against the larger than life plans of the: self-proclaimed ‘Technoking of Tesla’, to colonize Mars and introduce self-driving electric cars, a matter of much debate amongst health and safety experts.
My take on this? There was only one winner here- the NBC Network.
Saturday Night Live has been suffering from plummeting ratings ever since it got back on the air, post the pandemic, with viewership dropping to a measly 4 million in the previous episodes. With the US Presidential Elections now over, and no real content to polarise people’s opinions, the last few episodes had been a drag. In general, SNL had become a show exclusively for the liberals, and with Trump no longer in office to make fun of, the show needed a reboot.
Having someone like Elon Musk host it, and deliver in this manner, meant only one thing- America’s once upon a time darling show was back in public attention. For the first time in its history, SNL was being broadcast live on YouTube, even outside the US. Such is the pull of Musk, who has 52 Million followers on Twitter, compared to SNL’s measly 3 Million, that people who have never seen an episode before, tuned in to watch yesterday. NBC’s mobile app crashed owing to the unprecedented traffic of viewers.
Lorne Michaels, the 76-year-old creator and executive producer of SNL, has clearly indicated that he is willing to experiment with the content and audience, having seen growth hard to come by in the recent months.
As for Elon? This was yet another opportunity for him to portray and humanize himself, in times wherein the general population has a negative sentiment against Billionaires. Despite having justified on multiple occasions, his reason for accumulating wealth- to make sure interplanetary travel is possible, getting access to communicate that message directly into living rooms across the world, to a segment that does not necessarily buy into the vision, was a no-brainer.
With multiple Tesla and Space X references, not to forget DogeCoin, there were tangible returns in terms of eyeballs for all of Musk’s vested interests. But will this result in sustainable retention of the newly acquired viewers for the SNL?
Only time will tell.
If you liked this newsletter from Incentify, why not share it with someone you like? Let’s build the community :)
P.S- Follow us on Twitter now!