God, hes left as on aur oun.
#nodads jokes.
The thing, about Elon Musk’s inability to effectively deploy, or even, seemingly, to enjoy, humor:
He’s not trying to be funny, per se. It’s a show of power, not unlike stupidity: I can say anything, anything at all, he’s saying, and so long as it’s approximately humor-shaped, so long as it appears to be somewhere in the vague neighborhood of a joke, thousands upon thousands of people will laugh, because it was said by me.
This, of course, would be the actual function, the purpose, of dad jokes: because I am the patriarch, my jokes do not actually have to be funny to get you to react to them. But the thing about dad jokes is they’re almost always told with an awareness of and even an embarrassment at that purpose, even if it never manages to be articulated as such—there’s almost always an ironic detachment in the telling of them, and a knowing, groaning performance of disgust in the response.
But of course, Musk is a genius of this brave new age, and has no time for such niceties as reflection, or self-consciousness. Say the thing; bask. Open. Brazen. Naked. Ding an sich.
