Against All Odds, Elon Musk is Getting Even Worse at Comedy

In his latest venture, tech billionaire Elon Musk trained his robot friend to try to make people laugh at parties when he cannot do it himself.

While that sentence may sound like the plot of a picture book aimed at the world’s loneliest children, it is, in fact, the newest feature for the Twitter A.I. model Grok that Musk teased during his latest appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. After losing a flame war with Hard Drive over his habitual meme-theft, hosting one of the worst Saturday Night Live episodes of the century and bombing so hard at a Dave Chappelle show that his employees reportedly thought he might kill himself, Musk has had serious difficulty in convincing anyone besides his most brain-dead admirers that he is le epic internet comedy king.

That’s where the A.I. engineers of Twitter stepped up to provide their boss with some much-needed assistance in social settings where he might want to amuse someone whose job doesn't depend on how hard they laugh at his jokes. Here is Musk introducing the “Epic Vulgar Roast” capabilities of Grok's Unhinged Mode:

An understated part of this video's misery is the second-hand embarrassment from Joe Rogan, who was, at one point, a professional comedian, pretending that his billionaire buddy is saying anything worth laughing at while describing a hypothetically humorous situation where his robot might make a vaguely raunchy joke. 

The fact that Musk couldn't even recall a single one of these “forbidden words” that Grok might spew out after several rounds of repeated instructions in front of growingly uncomfortable group of party-goers makes us wonder whether Rogan is on the Tesla or Twitter payroll as Musk's professional (and only) friend.

Unsurprisingly, it took the internet about twelve seconds to test out Grok's “Epic Vulgar Roast” setting on Musk himself – though, really, we should all save it for the next time we see Musk at a party: 

Despite how Musk's years-long quest to use his massive wealth and access to cutting-edge technology in order to make himself seem like a good hang is incidentally destroying political discourse across the world, his progressively desperate attempts at humor are actually pretty incredible and completely unintentional dark comedy in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way. 

The harder Musk tries to convince the public that he is a funny, likable guy using increasingly convoluted methods, the more he reveals just how humorless and empty his soul truly is. No matter how many tech companies he takes over, or how much he juices the Twitter algorithm to make his tweets perform better than his political enemies, or how many memes he steals and crops out the watermark before reposting, or how many times he gets booed offstage at a stadium stand-up show, or how many SNL cast members think he's the worst host in history, or how many joke-writing robots he brings to parties, Musk will never be a comedian, but he'll always be a punchline.