Mark Normand answers Musk's flying car with a Tiger Woods joke
Seven words, one punchline, aimed at the post that rattled Brian Redban.
Mark Normand saw Elon Musk post about a flying car and did what Mark Normand does. He replied with seven words. "Two have already been sold to tiger woods."
Two have already been sold to tiger woods
That is the whole joke. No thread, no follow up, no explanation. It lands on top of Musk's post, which read "Turns out the future does have flying cars" with a video attached.
The set up he was riffing on
The same reveal had already wrecked somebody's night. Brian Redban said he watched Musk and Tesla introduce the flying car five minutes before he had to walk on stage and do comedy, and that it rattled him. He described his brain as scrambled, compared the feeling to a moon landing and to 9-11, and said that after 52 years alive he does not even know what is second best anymore. We covered that one earlier.
So the running bit now has two halves. One comedian treats the flying car as the most astonishing thing he has ever seen. The other treats it as a new way for a famous golfer to crash.
Why the joke works
Normand is not arguing with Musk and he is not arguing with Redban. He is doing the thing where a huge piece of news gets shrunk down to one small, mean, specific image, and the image does all the work. A flying car is science fiction. A flying car with Tiger Woods behind the wheel is a punchline people got to without being told.
It is a joke. Nobody has sold anything to Tiger Woods as far as the posts go, and Normand did not claim it as news. Musk's post is the only part of this that is a real announcement, and even that is a man posting a video with a one line caption.
What is actually interesting is the gap in reaction time. Redban's response was awe, written in the voice of a guy who could not get his head straight before a set. Normand's response was a tagline, the kind of thing a comic writes in the ten seconds between seeing a headline and moving on. Same post, two completely different jobs.
No word yet on whether Redban found a second best.
being alive 52 years… I don’t even know what’s second best now.
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