The comedian’s gym joke bombed with the room in Studio 8H, but he ran it at dress rehearsal first, and Saturday Night Live aired it anyway.
Shane Gillis did not stumble into the backlash over his third Saturday Night Live monologue. He walked into Studio 8H on Saturday, did a version of the same crude bit about how women dress at the gym that he had already performed hours earlier at dress rehearsal, and NBC let it air. By Monday, the monologue had more than a million views on YouTube and Dan Levy was calling it out on Instagram. If this was a mistake, nobody involved is acting like it.
The Joke
The bit itself was not new. Gillis has done gym material before, and the premise, a guy who has not worked out in years discovering what people wear to the gym now, is about as old as observational comedy gets. There was one genuinely sharp image in it, and a tag about being stuck in the background of strangers’ workout videos that turned the joke back on himself. But the punchline relied on a slur, and in a room full of New Yorkers who came to see a sketch show, it landed with a thud.
Levy, the Schitt’s Creek co-creator, wrote that he was stunned the line could exist on live national television, and said “more men need to be standing up” against that kind of material. He was far from alone.
A Bad Fit for SNL Then and Now
Levy is right, and this is not only a women’s issue. It is everybody’s issue. When men on national television treat women as objects for a cheap laugh, other men take the cue, and complacency is how that kind of thinking keeps getting a pass. More men should be saying so out loud.
If anything, Saturday proved what was clear from the start: Shane Gillis was never right for SNL. His comedy has always been hit or miss. The stand-up has always been more awkward and uncomfortable than traditionally funny, and his Netflix series Tires, for all its interesting premise, is more of the same: the kind of laugh you give because you are uneasy, built on viewpoints that do not need to be perpetuated. That style can play to his own crowds, the ones who cheered when he name-checked Joe Rogan and Theo Von from the stage. In a room full of New Yorkers at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, it fell flat, and it deserved to.
SNL Got Lucky Then Pressed Their Luck
The more interesting question is why SNL keeps booking him. The show has history with Gillis. It hired him as a cast member in 2019 and dropped him within days after old podcast clips surfaced with racist and homophobic language. It has since brought him back to host three times, and each monologue has drawn complaints, from jokes about his own family in his first outing to a riff comparing liberals to Star Wars villains in his second.
Lorne Michaels has always understood that a controversial host is a promotional tool. Donald Trump hosted during his 2015 campaign, and Dave Chappelle‘s 2022 monologue drew criticism for invoking antisemitic stereotypes while discussing Kanye West. Gillis fits a pattern, and the pattern works: the clips travel further than a safe monologue ever would, and the outrage cycle becomes free marketing for a show in its 52nd season.
That is the uncomfortable truth here. Gillis got exactly the reaction his brand thrives on, and SNL got exactly the attention it booked him for. The only people left out of the deal were the ones in the audience who did not laugh.
For a lighter recent monologue, see Taylor Swift crashing Dakota Johnson’s SNL opener last week.
