Elon grabbed onto the whole "comedy is illegal/ cancel culture" trope from the comedy bro sphere who used it as a hot topic from like 2017 to 2021. I think there were some obvious currents of that, particularly on college campuses, but I don't think it was ever as inflated as some as those guy's sense of self satisfaction from grabbing a sense of victimhood. It was also a marketing angle for some mediocre comics with decent but stationary careers, at the time. Hence comedy specials with nonsensical and dramatic titles like "uncancelable" or "on the edge" or "triggered" and other shit that alluded to "watch out, this guy's a badass and he doesn't care anymore." And pretty much every guy I heard moaning about hordes of delicate thought police coming to silence them were doing it on a podcast that had thousands and sometimes millions of viewers. Sometimes they were complaining about being silenced in front of an arena of people. But almost always they were complaining about being silenced while they said it into a literal microphone.
But while all those guys whined about it, shows like 'South Park and 'Always Sunny' were doing the wildest cultural commentary I've ever seen on television. And they were doing it right out of the corporate jaws of ad reliant, cable networks. And I'm sure they fielded some angry letters and comments, but nothing fucking happened to them and they kept doing it -- politics, race, sexuality, mental health. You name it, they were fucking with it. "Comedy is illegal" is nothing more than a broad shield to past and future criticism.