Shane Gillis Finally Gets His Predictably Dire SNL Debut

And Your Host…

Tonight offered a pretty clear picture of what SNL would be like if Shane Gillis hadn’t gotten himself preemptively canned for being a loose-lipped bigot back in 2019. You know, except that Shane Gillis was actually on Saturday Night Live in some capacity in 2024. Casting back from tonight’s tiresome outing, the best that could be said of the stand-up and podcaster is that he might have gotten one or two halfway decent sketches on as a featured player in a one-and-done SNL career. Stolid, halting, and entirely free of screen charisma, the burly Gillis came off like a past-his-prime athlete called on to host, complete with hesitant line readings, awkward transitions, and cue card dependancy. He wasn’t god-awful, he wasn’t anything close to good. “Shane Gillis—SNL host” wouldn’t be certain to swamp the internet for the next few days if not for—well, you know.

If somehow you don’t know, Shane Gillis was hired as an SNL featured player in 2019 (alongside Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman) before tapes from his paywalled podcast Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast (co-hosted with Matt McCusker) were unearthed by writer and former Paste editor Seth Simons and others. In those recordings, Gillis drops gay slurs, anti-Asian slurs, and other bigoted bullshit, all of which saw SNL boss Lorne Michaels swoop down to disavow Gillis’ hiring. (Actually Michaels, who’s come under fire for the Gillis booking after it was announced a few weeks ago, has downplayed his own disapproval of Gillis’ comedy, blaming sponsors and a “panicked” NBC for making him jettison his annointed new cast member.)

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That announcement, that Gillis would come back to host the show he never actually preformed on, has set off the predictable controversy Michaels was counting on in his recent string of PR-courting bookings. Trump, Kanye, and Elon all got the golden ticket long after their various bigotries and malfeasances were public knowledge, with the venerable Saturday Night Live honcho waving away any objections with the practiced air of a guy long accustomed to his position as unquestioned and unquestionable comedy guru. In his interminably airy explanations of how he helms the SNL enterprise after half a century, Michaels reliably portrays himself as above the fray, plucking cast members and hosts according to merits he alone can adjudicate. That there’s a definite eye cast toward ratings, YouTube views, and morning-after chatter is not as readily discussed, although, as with Gillis’ booking, those invaluable eyeballs are assuredly what Michaels is going to get.

As a Saturday Night Live viewer for as long as there’s been a Saturday Night Live, my relationship to the cult of Lorne has necessarily evolved. Youthful hero worship for the young Canadian maverick’s invasion of hidebound American TV was tempered with accumulating tales of self-importance and the growing realization that Michaels’ (and SNL‘s) reputation for taboo-toppling socio-comic courage was increasingly overblown. Memoirs and tell-alls punctured the producer’s air of infallible comic taste and discernment with many, many accounts of a dysfunctional workplace ruled by a manipulatively distant, increasingly out of touch patriarch, while the unavoidable ups and downs of the show over the years stretched Lorne’s reputation as comedy taste-maker wafer-thin enough to read the creeping reactionary face of the old man clutching stubbornly to the helm.

As to why Shane Gillis got the big redemption call years after Lorne called the comic’s on-the-record bigotry “offensive, hurtful and unacceptable,” I’ve got a few theories. For one thing, Lorne doesn’t enjoy being questioned. If Gillis, whose comedy Michaels has championed both before and since his abrupt firing, was good enough to be hired in the first place, then Lorne can reassert his authority by having him host. If, as reported at the time, Gillis was initially hired to court a more right-leaning audience than is SNL‘s usual, then bringing him back at a time when the right-wing in America is truly feeling itself isn’t going to hurt ratings, either. Then there’s the undeniable fact that Gillis is hot right now, with his 2023 Netflix special Beautiful Dogs topping the streamer’s carefully inscrutable algorithms. That that fact goes hand-in-hand with Shane Gillis’ continued courting of controversy and alt-right fandom can’t, as much as Michaels would care to, be ignored, however.

The facts are out there, and this intro has run long enough for Gillis supporters (who are, at this moment, flooding Twitter with attacks on SNL star Bowen Yang on their podcast idol’s behalf) have already tuned out. If, as Michaels and other high-profile fans like Louis CK and Jerrod Carmichael suggest, Gillis’ stand-up is a more nuanced examination of bro-comedy white attitudes than it seems on the surface, then the comic’s specials do bear some of that out. But then there’s Gillis’ Patreon-only podcast statements and his regular praise of people like: Proud Boys founder and white supremacist Gavin McInnes; fellow podcast blowhard (and obvious aspirational figure) Joe Rogan; those alt-right comic assholes similarly cancelled by Adult Swim; and even a pair of Holocaust deniers (one of whom is his podcasting partner’s bother) who pop up on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast’s like a couple of cooking-segment regulars. Which all point to a far more calculated two-headed pitch for stardom, one for public consumption and one for his online audience of disaffected, boorish, bigoted white boys.

A strong monologue could have taken the bull by the proverbial horns, but Gillis was shaky and uncertain, hinting constantly that his best jokes were just too edgy for the room. Urging viewers not to Google why he was fired, Gillis proceeded to round off every bit with an appeal for audience mercy, claiming, “I probably shouldn’t be up here, honestly,” and claiming, “Look, I don’t have any material that could be on TV.” Except there are plenty of better comedians who can work around the strictures of TV standards and practices all while doing some daring and hilarious material. Gillis merely shuffled uncomfortably while signaling to his real fans that all the good stuff is just too hip for SNL. It’s deadening. That Gillis managed to toss in some light homophobia (in a bit about being “gay” for his mom as a little boy) and a watered down version of his controversial material about people with Down Syndrome only underscored how unequal the comedian was to seizing control of the spotlight he found himself, at long last, under.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: Putting all of that aside (and that’s a lot to put aside, I recognize), Shane Gillis was certainly involved tonight. He appeared in almost every sketch, in fact, which was as indicative of Michaels’ desire to give Gillis a do-over as it was obvious that he was never going to be a big deal on SNL. Gillis was just there, a more or less serviceable centerpiece of some mediocre sketches that, to be fair, weren’t going to show up on anyone’s best-of list, regardless of host. That said, I could see a couple of these pieces really popping with a better performer to goose them to life, including the HR meeting, which is my grudging pick for the top spot. With Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman’s moderators helming a mandatory rundown of their company’s policies, Gillis’ inappropriate question asker looks for every loophole through which he can continue to pester the object of his workplace obsession, and there’s a loony logic to the bit. After the pair grudgingly explain that coworkers shouldn’t date and that all requests for a date should stop at one, Gillis quickly calculates how he can “bank” yeses from other women to repeatedly ask out Chloe Troast’s uninterested coworker, whether yeses roll over with the new year, and so on. Again, there’s the seed of an escalating satire of corporate culture and good old horny nonsense (Andrew Dismukes innocently asks if its okay that he’s sleeping with supervisor Punkie Johnson to advance his career) which needed a more confident central performance to carry it. Kenan lifts it a bit, asking if the one-yes policy applies to asking women if they’re ticklish, and Marcello Hernandez rocks some revealing booty khakis, but it’s still a shaky entry for the best of anything.

The Worst: One of Gillis’ main shields against attack is his constant theme of self-deprecation regarding his supposed personal failings, so the ugly sex doll commercial served the purpose tonight. Sarah Sherman mugged her way toward making Gillis break at one point as her rubbery “Fugliana” is put through her paces as the mail-order sex toy who’s unappealing enough to not make the guys who have sex with her feel even worse about themselves. Most of the show’s female cast get the same treatment, frozen-facedly enduring the awkward explanations of their incel owners in a laugh-free parade of uncreative cruelty. Sherman seems to be having fun going for weird and gross as she’s wont to do, but no thanks.

The Rest: Who’s ready for a Forrest Gump sketch?! Well, SNL‘s doing one anyway, despite the fact that Mikey Day does, at best, a C-minus Gump, here attending his 20th high school graduation. (Seriously, it’s like bad audience improv suggestion theater.) Gillis is the mullet-sporting former jock who used to chase Forrest down the street and whose continued badgering of his old victim is greeted with Forrest’s solemn-faced revelations about all the dead people and billions of dollars that have made up his post-school life and career. Tossing a wig on Gillis and having him play an ignorant jerk (his club owner brags about once doing blow with Danny DeVito) might not be a stretch, but it still feels like Gillis can’t get comfortable onstage.

Michael Longfellow does a passable Rob Lowe, which is good to know. The sketch based on the game show about that floor sees Gillis’ champ taking on a series of challengers whose varying capabilities are intermittently pretty funny. Bowen Yang’s confident contestant chokes upon being asked to identify a glass of milk (apparently The Floor does that sort of thing?), his sweaty guesses ranging from “liquid teeth” to the inexplicably hilarious “murk.” Gillis’ turn sees the sketch groping for some sort of deeper well of satire, with the stammering white guy refusing to guess the names of various very famous Black figures “in case I’m wrong.” Gillis is actually not bad here, his own panicky lighting round flop sweat emerging as a parade of quick-fire mutters. “Huge fan of hers—pass,” he says quickly to a picture of Aretha Franklin. Still, while the sketch seems to be tilting toward some sort of Black Jeopardy greatness, it never gets very close. I did like how Ego Nwodim’s supposed art expert can’t ID a single famous painting (“We Gon’ Die” is as close as she gets to “The Scream”), and how Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” elicits the callback “Murkmaid.”

The best I can say about the Jamaican church sketch is that it’s not as bothersome as a sketch featuring Shane Gillis putting on Jamaican patois could be. Actually, I take it back—Ego and Kenan make for a very energetic engine to the sketch as the pair of preachers musically welcoming Gillis’ very out of place Ohio tourist family to their congregation. Still, there’s a queasiness to this being the first post-monologue sketch, as if the show wanted to dangle to possibility of its controversial host (again, for reference) doing something dreadful, only to snatch the sketch back to being merely sort of okay.

Gillis is the weakest part of the pre-tape ad for a sports betting app that lets you bet on just how your gambling addicted friend is going to debase himself on another sports gambling app. Again, there’s no indication that Gillis was ever going to be a confident sketch performer, even here with the luxury of do-overs. There’s plenty of stuff to say about the proliferation of newly legalized online sports betting and the pitfalls around them, but this isn’t especially sharp, the only stab coming at the juxtaposition of the pitchmen’s mandatory warnings about the perils of gambling and the observation that these ads perpetually highlight gaudy trimmings of excess. Even with a more energetic player to kick this premise into another gear, it’d still sputter.

Shane Gillis does a passable Trump impression, so the other pre-tape, a sports movie parody where the Like Mike magic sneakers are replaced by Trump’s gaudy golden kicks which are in no way a cheap knockoff of far better made sneakers or a low-rent snake-oil scam to get his cultish supporters to help pay off his massive and mounting legal penalties. But I kid the insurrectionist rapist conman seeking to end American democracy as we know it. James Austin Johnson pops in to duel with Gillis’ Trump-channeling shoe-wearer (who has inherited Trump’s penchant for bald-faced bullying in the face of obvious failure), which is brief but amusing, which is about all that can be said about the sketch proper.

Weekend Update update

(Note: As of 6 a.m. Sunday, the two correspondent pieces have still not been uploaded anywhere. We’ll update when/if SNL chooses to do so.)

Jost and Che seem happiest when they can let Donald Trump’s own words do the jokes for them. It requires less effort than “Biden sure is old” gags anyway. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of unnervingly amusing gaffes and/or flat-out evidence of insanity/megalomaniacal would-be dictatorship to go around. Jost lets the Republican’s chosen one ramble on about the “liars, cheaters, fraudsters, censors, imposters” and so on he’s going to subject to a day one “judgement day” before recognizing where he’s heard it all before. (Cue photo of Bane at the football game.) He also plays Trump backpedaling on the right-wing assault on in-vitro fertilization (just endangered by an Alabama court ruling), concluding with Trump pronouncing the phrase “precious, beautiful little baby” in a singsong “Rumpelstiltskin” voice. And while it’s hilarious to watch the entire GOP realize that its all-out assault on women’s rights has overextended to an issue that rich white women voters actually care about and to point and laugh at Trump’s attempts to sound like an actual human, it’s not especially ambitious stuff. (Don’t worry, Jost got in two “old Biden” jokes to even things out.)

Both correspondent pieces tonight could have been stronger. Marcello came out as one of those fertilized IVF-bound eggs the Alabama Supreme Court just declared viable human beings. (And read the chief justice’s resume of Christian nationalist nutt-buttery if you want to see how that came about.) Covered in icicles and sporting a fleshy bodysuit, Hernandez takes a few stabs at the lunatic reasoning behind the theocratic Alabama nonsense (suggesting they go all the way and criminalize the contents of Michael Che’s post-masturbation hand towel) before making the whole thing about Jost jokes. Now, I like a Jost joke as much as the next guy, but Marcello goading Jost into slapping him by calling the anchor “a generic white blob” just like him is less about the subject at hand and more about the always crowd-pleasing sport of Jost-bashing.

Bowen Yang did a turn as Truman Capote, recently back in the news thanks to the new season of Feud, and, I have to say, I wasn’t feeling it. The ever campy and bitchy Capote seems a natural fit for Yang’s Update roster, and there’s a “Next!”—style Jebediah Atkinson potential in the late author’s quick-hit dismissal of notable women form history. (“I always said women are like kombucha: full of yeast and they’re technically alive.”) But it never takes flight, which is a bewildering shame.

Recurring Sketch report

None! See, there’s always a bright spot.

Political Comedy Report

Credit to SNL for trying something different. That the “different” in the case of this cold open meant burrowing down into the current Republican Party’s abject surrender to Donald Trump’s hateful bigotry with a sense of melancholy resignation might not make for a rip-roarer of a first sketch, but it’s at least a different shading to what has been an increasingly dire slot. Portraying a desultory dinner (pigs in blankets and tater tots) of a quartet of downtrodden GOP lawmakers, the sketch sees the four (Mikey Day’s James Risch, Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio, Devon Walker’s Tim Scott and JAJ’s Lindsey Graham) all lamenting how their party’s been taken over by Trump and his MAGA minions—before loudly proclaiming their absolute fealty for potential voters to hear. While SNL has a long history of attributing moral quandaries to Trump-adjacent figures who in real life exhibit none whatsoever, there’s a general sense that there are some serving Republicans privately horrified at the fascistic, racist path Trump has taken them down (or at least wishing that Trump and his hand-picked loonies could be a little more discrete about it). Here, the limp commiseration amongst the quartet wars with their need to be perceived as being in lockstep with their chosen leader, regardless of how terribly he’s treated them personally. Day’s Risch, who in real life has been a supporter of aid for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion, bemoans the fact that Trump killed a bipartisan funding bill “with one phone call,” finally declaring the GOP frontrunner “downright dangerous.” “And you just endorsed him, right?,” asks Marcello’s Rubio unsurprised, to which Risch replies immediately, “Big time.” One by one, the four Republicans recall how low Trump has sunk in attacking them (doxxing, insulting, demands of public fealty, praising the insurrectionist who literally crapped in Risch’s office), and one by one they all down their cocktails and tater tots and succumb. It’s not the sort of vituperative broadside against the Trump party that hotter heads (like me) have called for in favor of SNL‘s traditional watery stew of impressions and hazy hot topics. But it resonates on its own sad frequency, which isn’t a bad thing. (Oh, and Devon’s Tim Scott remains truly excellent, even if I hope the bewilderingly self-debasing would-be Veep disappears from the political scene.)

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Al lot of eyes were on Bowen Yang tonight, for all the wrong reasons. I said it when Gillis slurred himself out of a job and I’ll say it after the comedian’s inexplicable return to host—Yang shouldn’t have to deal with a whole dumptruck full of idiot shit that has nothing to do with him. But now I—as guilty as the rest of you—watched for every interaction with Gillis to try to discern if anything was lingering. (You know, after Yang’s hiring as an out gay male and SNL‘s first Chinese-American cast member was hijacked by recordings of his fellow hire going off about “Ch***s” and “f*****s” on the same day.) Note to Lorne: Hiring bigots fucks up office morale. Regardless of all that, Yang had a strong night, even if his Capote wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen. To be fair, I’ve seen Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones impersonate the late author (not to mention Feud‘s Tom Hollander), so competition is stiff.

Mikey had quantity if not quality airtime. (That Gump was rough.) Marcello had some of both, however, and let’s give it up to those booty shorts. As I’ve been saying, the ensemble feel is nice, even if Saturday Night Live really needs at least one performer to truly take the stardom baton.

10-to-One Report

Man, a good host would have made this one sing like the Packers fight song emerging from a waterproof butt plug. There were pacing problems—it took forever for the premise to kick in, thanks to some truly sluggish deliveries from Gillis and others. But once the joke was introduced (our always-listening electronic devices are gonna suggest some revealing pop-up ads), there was real potential for some final sketch greatness. After pooh-poohing his friends’ claims that their phones, Alexas, etc are spying on them, Gillis whips out his email, only for his mockery of the resulting targeted ad clearly indicates that he is in the market for a Green Bay Packers-themed anal device that is not only impervious to his jacuzzi’s jets but can also belt out said theme song. Even the setup that the song sounds louder when the wearer opens his/her mouth is a winner sight gag in waiting, only for Gillis’ uncommitted delivery to tamp down the expected big laugh. What can I say, I had higher hopes for the Packers butt plug sketch.

Stray observations

Gillis’ contestant wins the Black celebrity round because he relievedly recognizes Family Guy‘s Cleveland.

The goodnights cut out just as Gillis approached Bowen Yang, presumably coming in for a hug. See what you made me care about, Michaels?

It didn’t go anywhere, but I appreciated James Austin Johnson’s Graham offering up a Good Will Hunting-esque “It’s not your fault” to the ever-fawning Tim Scott.

I liked how Gillis’ office pest whips out a ready $1500 to “buy” gay colleague Michael Longfellow’s unused asks in the HR sketch.

Honestly, the cut for time sketch is funnier than anything we got in the show proper. Evil bird puppet? Yeah, that’s the stuff. (Wonder if Lorne will have to refund some insurance company product placement, though.)

Well, that’s over. Next week, Sydney Sweeney hosts, with musical guest Kacey Musgraves.