Saturday Night Live's Elon Musk Announcement Parodies

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About

Saturday Night Live's Elon Musk Announcement Parodies refers to an exploitable meme template created after the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live announced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would host the show on May 8th, 2021. The show made the announcement by tweeting a picture of three notes, one showing the date, the next showing the host (Musk), and a third showing the night's musical guest (Miley Cyrus). After the announcement, some Twitter users criticized the choice to make Musk the host and made parodies of the announcement tweet by editing other names onto the cards.

Origin

On April 24th, 2021, the Saturday Night Live Twitter^[1] account announced that Elon Musk would host the May 8th, 2021, episode, while Miley Cyrus would be the musical guest. They made the announcement by posting a picture of three cards containing all the information. The tweet gained over 3,700 retweets, 12,400 quote-tweets and 26,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Spread

The announcement led to harsh criticism from some online, as many dislike Musk for a variety of reasons, such as allegations he prevented his employees from unionizing and his status as one of the two richest people in the world.^[2] The criticism was widely expressed through parodies of SNL's announcement where Musk replaced with a villainous character from pop culture. Shortly after the announcement was made, Twitter^[3] user @BonerWizard posted a parody of SNL's announcement showing O.J. Simpson as the host and "That lil yodeling nerd" (Mason Ramsay) as the musical guest. The tweet gained over 6,900 retweets and 104,000 likes (shown below, left). They also posted a template^[4] for other users to use to create their own variations (shown below, right).

After @bonerwizard's tweets, the template spread around Twitter, as users replaced the host's name with other villainous characters. Popular examples include a tweet by @TheirMaddesty^[5] who named the host and musical guest "Mitch McConnell" and "Glee Cast," respectively, gaining over 2,000 retweets and 35,000 likes (shown below, left). User @KaraBTweets^[6] made the joke with "Sarah Huckabee Sanders" and "That U2 Album That Showed Up On Everyone's iPhone," gaining over 1,700 retweets and 30,000 likes (shown below, right). In the wake of these jokes, the trend was covered by Uproxx^[7] and Screenrant^[8] online.