The future of comedy on Elon Musk’s Twitter is owning the libs

“Comedy is now legal on Twitter.”

So declared Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk upon taking over in late October, marking another chapter in the long, strange history of titters on Twitter. Musk fashions himself a funny guy—even as professionals such as Patton Oswalt declare that Musk is “somebody who wants to be funny, and they’re not funny”—and we’ve seen his many attempts at humor both before and after his takeover. But what does his reign mean for comedy on the real-time social network?

Two nights before Thanksgiving, the popular parody account Bored Elon Musk, which was initially created in 2013 as a winking nod to the kind of inventions that an Elon Musk might suggest in a moment of ennui (as when Musk tossed off the hyperloop concept that same year), took to—where else?—Twitter Spaces to explore the future of comedy on Twitter.

Bored, who is pseudonymous, is a compelling figure to explore Comedy Twitter. As the title of one of his podcast appearances declared, he’s “a parody that became a company,” having launched a blockchain gaming startup called Bored Box. There was a time not that long ago—say, the early 2010s—when Twitter was not only more gut-busting, but also created real opportunities for funny people to build a following and either create a career path or bolster one. The longing for a return to those days is genuine, and it’s worth considering how Comedy Twitter isn’t what it was and how the platform might be a funny factory again—and for whom.

The golden age

The first name Bored mentioned was Megan Amram, a comedy writer whose tweets won her gigs on Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, and she’s now the showrunner of a Pitch Perfect spinoff, Bumper in Berlin, on Peacock. She started on Twitter in 2009, which in hindsight, might have been the beginning of Twitter’s comedic golden age. Bored describes Amram’s style as kind of a “proto-shitposting,” which is funny for its ahistorical ignorance of message board culture that birthed the internet communication style. He even went so far as to suggest that the “original shitposting quote tweet” style was The Tonight Show monologue. Well, I’m not bored.

Bored’s introduction of “shit” into the conversation is apt, as 2009 also gave the culture comedy writer Justin Halpern’s Twitter account, Shit My Dad Says, which became such a sensation that it spawned a book deal and a CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. The early days of the platform were also the beginning of what came to be known as Weird Twitter, as epitomized by the anonymous account dril, whose legend knows no bounds.

As much as Comedy Twitter seemed to be a more freeform space for performers to experiment, the service’s early viral growth attracted more venture money, and with it, more pressure to add bold-faced names and revenue. With that came a crackdown on some of the fun. Twitter saw at least part of its future in courting celebrities to use the platform and engage their fans there, so out went a lot of parody accounts that could confuse people as well as alienate famous folks from tweeting. Sound familiar? It was perversely fun to see Musk get a lesson in parody this month and how chaos ensues if you don’t establish some boundaries.

The death of comedy on Twitter

The comedy writer Damilare Sonoiki, whose credits include Black-ish and The Simpsons, joined Bored as cohost for the Spaces, and he pegged the beginning of the end of Comedy Twitter to the 2016 election and the Trump presidency that followed. “You can’t be funny and sanctimonious at the same time,” Sonoiki said, noting the preachiness of a lot of the reaction to Trump. On one level, he’s correct: Trump was definitely not good for comedy. A generation of performers was ruined for at least some of their one-time fans by being resistance libs, Russia conspiracy brains, or reactionary cancel-culture paranoiacs—with some of it playing out live on Twitter, but all of it meriting endless debate on the platform.

But as Sonoiki and Bored rhapsodized that thanks to Musk, “the pendulum is swinging back” from not being able to make “certain jokes,” it’s again worth taking a moment to remember all the way back to before Trump started running for president in 2015. Twitter’s fealty to “free speech” had blinded it to its toxicity, which led many comedians as well as everyday folks to decide that it wasn’t all that funny being harassed all the time. Bad-faith, alt-right campaigns against people who once saw Twitter as a place to experiment with satire also sent a clear signal that the tweets weren’t worth it.

The Spaces group was correct in diagnosing that Twitter in the Trump era became more about news versus being funny or entertaining. But they didn’t acknowledge the cause: President Trump, a shitposter in every sense of that phrase, used Twitter to make himself the main character for news and commentary every morning. Now Musk is filling the role of being the site’s single object of obsession.

The re-legalization of comedy on Twitter

As the Spaces assemblage explored whether comedy is “meaner” now on Twitter, the discourse wended around to whether Musk himself has become nastier in his stabs at humor. The answers vary from “borderline” to “he’s just funny.” As Sonoiki, who is an alum of the Harvard Lampoon, said earlier in the evening, “Comedy is comedy.” He tries to explain that Musk “doesn’t necessarily punch down. He picks fights with other people who have power.” He acknowledges, in the course of his assessment, that Musk is the richest person in the world, but never quite connects the dot that this definitionally means that he’s always punching down.

The primary evidence that comedy is back on Twitter is Musk’s reinstatement of the Christian-centric Babylon Bee, which “altered the course of history with one joke,” said Sonoiki, who admitted that he’s written for the site, describing himself as a “comedy mercenary.” That “one joke” is likely the anti-trans one made at the expense of a Biden administration official that the Babylon Bee refused to take down, resulting in the loss of its account for eight months.

This is what’s being undone, or rather, unleashed by Musk, with the audience acknowledging that they’re “here for it.”

As the night wound to a close, Bored Elon Musk, who had hoped his namesake inspiration would drop in to share his own take on the future of comedy on Twitter, decided to check Musk’s tweets to see what he was up to that kept him away. Musk had recently shared a video of himself finding a cache of Stay Woke T-shirts in a closet at Twitter headquarters, which he—and his fans—found hilarious.

No one on the live audio chat seemed to know—or if they did, care to acknowledge—that the shirts had been created by the Black employee resource group at Twitter. You know, the one Musk quickly dismantled after taking over? There was no mention of the context that Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey wore the shirt at public events, in solidarity with Black activists who used Twitter to share live coverage of police brutality and protests against it in the mid-2010s. They also didn’t express any sense of the history of the phrase emanating from a time before “woke” had been transformed into an epithet, when activists used it as an admonition to be vigilant against white oppression.

What mattered was that Musk had owned the libs yet again. And that appears to be the future of comedy on Twitter.