During a sketch set in a Caribbean church, comedian and first-time Saturday Night Live host Shane Gillis speaks confidently in Jamaican patois — generally a no-no for a white guy these days. His vacationing Ohio dad character has already tried it on for size twice, but in his first couple of efforts, he was timid. This time, however, he leans into the absence of subject-verb agreement with his whole chest. It gets a huge laugh from the studio audience. A visibly delighted Gillis has to swallow his own laugh in response, nearly breaking from the effort, which makes the crowd laugh even harder. The look on his face says: I cannot believe I am getting away with this.
It’s a fairly successful use case of how the conservative-friendly comic might have fit into the show he was famously fired from in 2019, just a few days after he’d been hired. Unfortunately, this sketch aired immediately after a punch-pulling transgressive monologue that highlighted why he would have been an uncomfortable addition to the cast in the first place.
If anyone thought SNL host Ayo Edebiri got in trouble for something she’d previously said on a podcast, that was nothing compared with what happened to Gillis in 2019. His firing was the result of resurfaced Asian slurs and homophobic comments from his podcast, which inevitably created the kind of outrage that often leads to boycotts. It was too much heat for NBC to withstand, so it dumped the comic before he’d appeared in a single sketch. Fortunately for him, getting canceled ended up being an incredible career move.
In losing one of the highest-profile gigs in comedy, Gillis gained a metric ton of notoriety and, crucially, support and sympathy from the free-speech-warrior contingent. Refusing to make himself a martyr and portray SNL and its fans as the woke enemy, Gillis instead focused on his work and parlayed infamy into an enormous following. His self-funded 2021 comedy special, Live in Austin, has been viewed 23 million times and was followed last year by a Netflix special that earned glowing praise from the New York Times. In four and a half years, he transformed himself from a potential punchline into someone famous enough to host SNL, even if the stunt factor of his backstory no doubt helped with the booking.
Although he sometimes comes off as if Barstool Sports were a person, what Gillis does best in his comedy is translate red-state values and interests for a (slightly) broader audience. In his SNL monologue, though, he does the opposite: explaining at one point, in the least offensive way he can muster, what a dude such as himself thinks gay men are like. “Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend,†he says before recalling childhood memories like gassing up his mom’s outfits and vibing out to Shania Twain with her. It’s not that this bit is mean or offensive, necessarily; it’s just filled with outdated clichés that have no business in an era of this show that tends to assume viewer familiarity with the modern landscape of sexuality and gender. And considering that his firing was partly due to homophobic content, performing this bit in this setting seems particularly unwise. It does not go over well, especially with the house band.
Gillis spends much of the first half of his monologue commenting on how not-well it’s going before whipping out the big guns: his road-tested material on his niece who has Down syndrome. (The New York Post helpfully telegraphed that this was coming, with a headline on Friday that read, “Shane Gillis plans to go hard, use trademark Down syndrome jokes on SNL.â€) This area is obviously tricky comedic territory, but Gillis threads the needle expertly and gets his biggest laughs of the monologue. However, the bit culminates in a moment when he uses the words “retarded,†“Black kids,†and “cracker†within ten seconds in a way that feels calculated to light up Twitter’s cancel finger and earn IDGAF points from his fans, but without going too far. It was a little too close to Ricky Gervais’s snide taboo testing without actually being “dangerous.†Nothing Gillis said is actually out of pocket, even if some of the words in isolation seem designed to trigger and surely succeeded with some audiences.
The entire monologue was giving bad-boy-on-best-behavior, and the tepid in-studio applause felt well earned. “I thought we were allowed to have fun here,†the host laments after one of the many jokes that didn’t get the response he expected. As that Jamaican church sketch confirms, Gillis is indeed allowed to have fun on SNL, and he’s even allowed to do it by saying things that might seem off limits on paper. But anyone whose sense of fun relies as heavily on stale tropes and rote button-pushing as Gillis did in his monologue seems fundamentally incompatible with Saturday Night Live in 2024. Although he deftly handled the material in many of his sketches, this episode ultimately suggests that he and the show are each better off without the other.
Here are the highlights:
HR Meeting
In a role that gibes well with the comedian’s persona, Gillis plays a horny corporate drone probing for loopholes in his company’s sexual-harassment policies. It’s the kind of sketch that starts off with one outrageous reed in a marshland of uptight normals but gradually reveals it’s weirdos all the way down. On the way there, we get lots of fun details, like the surprising popularity of the word query in this office and Gillis’s character casually having $1,500 in his pocket.
Trump Sneakers
Gillis is known in part for having one of the best Trump impressions around, so it seemed inevitable that his version would have to square off against SNL’s resident Trumpologist James Austin Johnson. After the lukewarm cold open teased a Trump appearance that never arrived, this sketch finally delivered the goods. The premise of “What if Like Mike but for Trump’s kicks†is as golden as those impossibly tacky shoes themselves, and this sketch makes the most of it.
Weekend Update: Truman Capote Shares His Favorite Women from History
The standout segment in Weekend Update this episode is Bowen Yang’s portrayal of Truman Capote. The legendary writer is back in the conversation right now due to Ryan Murphy’s latest season of Feud, which depicts the falling-out between Capote and the socialites whose confidence he betrayed. Yang’s command of Capote’s oft-imitated affect is superb, and his depiction of him as a misogynist is cutting in all the right ways. “Women are like kombucha — they’re full of yeast and technically alive,†he says with delightfully unpredictable delivery. I could easily watch an entire hour of this.
Fugliana
Gillis is a good sport for starring in this sketch as a man who worries that the typical sex doll will seem too far out of his league. He is upstaged, however, by Sarah Sherman, who plays the desired skankier sex doll, Fugliana. Her rigid posture and dinner-plate eyes flesh out the slam-dunk concept as Gillis demonstrates her many functional features, like striking just the right facial expression as he explains his idea for a podcast.
They’re Listening
Comedians have been mining the idea that our devices are listening to us for years, but it remains fertile ground because it’s wild that we’ve all just gotten used to that happening. Familiar as it may be, this sketch still wrings laughs out of the specificity of what Gillis’s character has been privately talking about — a Green Bay Packers–themed sex toy — and his dry delivery as he outs himself for it.
Cut for Time
• Sadly, I would bet on the success of a betting site like Rock Bottom Kings.
• Although the sketch about The Floor was a tad undercooked, Gillis’s contestant being unable to identify any famous Black historical figures was a clever way to play with some viewers’ perception of the comedian in the context of his firing.
• The highlight of Marcello Hernández playing a sentient frozen embryo on Weekend Update was when he compared himself to Colin Jost — just a couple of “generic white blobs.â€
• Why does “Forrest Gump’s high-school reunionâ€Â sound like the dregs of a Cards Against Humanity expansion pack?