There Must Be a Better Way to Phrase Jimmy Kimmel’s Elon Musk ‘Troll Hole’ Line
Some viewers of Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past Monday probably imagined Danny DeVito and Rob McElhenney snapping their fingers when the show’s host began his beatdown on Twitter CEO and QAnon conspiracy aficionado Elon Musk by claiming that the South African-American billionaire has been attempting to fill former president Donald Trump’s “troll hole.”
Kimmel began his opening monologue with a weekend roundup of the most joke-worthy news items, including an update on the ongoing Kanye West/Donald Trump anti-Semitism circus before addressing the tweets of Twitter’s CEO, who recently posted a god-awful pronouns joke that reads, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
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Kimmel remarked that, “Elon Musk seems to be intent on filling the ‘troll hole’ vacated by Donald Trump,” because, apparently, no one on Kimmel’s writing staff has seen It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or the smash hit musical “The Nightman Cometh.”
While Kimmel was clearly trying to draw attention to the alarming stream of anti-science and anti-truth conspiracy theories coming from the sometimes richest man in the world, the comment evokes DeVito’s famous line, “You gotta pay the troll toll to get into the boy’s soul” (or “hole” depending on how you hear it), which makes us wonder if there was perhaps a scrapped phrasing of the line that could have been less evocative of, as Dennis Reynolds puts it, “sexing from behind.”
Maybe our minds are in the gutter and we’ve just been watching too much Always Sunny, but here’s a line that could have worked just as well without any unfortunate implications: “Elon Musk has given up his integrity in order to succeed Donald Trump as Twitter’s biggest troll.”
And here’s one line that’s way, way worse: “Musk paid the soul toll to get inside Trump’s troll hole.”
