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I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live in a while so I didn’t realize that men are unfunny now.
If you haven’t heard the latest on that, Shane Gillis got invited back onto the sketch comedy show this weekend — after previously having been fired for various racist and homophobic jokes — and marked the occasion by saying that he’s just started going to the gym again after a long time away, and did we know that women there dress like wh***s now? They wear shorts that are colored like “artificial bait,” which stretch across their butt cheeks — did you know? Have you seen?! And worst of all, you’re not even allowed to ogle them when they wear these baity, tight little shorts: “Don’t look. You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming!”
There are so many questions I have about this monologue. The first one is: It really took you a week to write that? Because above all, the joke is so incredibly boring. Are we really at a point where we’re paying comedians vast sums of money to say “short shorts make women look like wh***s,” something we could access for free from any local evangelical pastor? Because yes, this joke violates the “don’t punch down” rule of comedy, but it also violates the rule of comedy that says it has to be funny. Here is a man who was asked to open one of the biggest TV shows in the world, who’s had a full week to prepare a short couple minutes of comedy with a mixed audience in mind (rather than, say, an audience of twelve-year-old boys), and this is the best he could rustle up. Maybe next time he goes on, he can try “Airplane food — how about that?!”
By the way, later in the show, Gillis said “f***” accidentally during a skit, for which he later apologized. Saying “f***” doesn’t really do social damage in the way calling women at the gym wh***s does, but it sure does affect your ability to go back on live TV when you inconvenience the people who have to censor the moment, so I guess that tracks.
Gillis’s response to anyone who didn’t like the women-as-wh***s bit — as usual, as he says every time he gets in some kind of racist-misogynist-homophobic-adjacent hot water — was that he “pushes boundaries” and “takes risks” with his comedy and he’s sorry to anyone who was offended. This, obviously, is an incredibly weak take, because a drunk man literally yelled “Wh***!” at me a couple months ago on the subway and he was not immediately declared one of the brightest and bravest comedic minds of our generation. “Women look like wh***s in tight shorts” pushes zero boundaries at all in a country where the president is a man who once famously talked about grabbing women “by the p****”, Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to promote female members of the army, and the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion; it is, instead, obvious and lazy pandering.
Shane Gillis was invited back to ‘Saturday Night Live’ this weekend — after previously having been fired for various racist and homophobic jokes (SNL)
Would that Shane Gillis could deliver us some edgy, boundary-pushing comedy, something that truly contradicts the status quo right now, such as “Maybe the world-ending AI should have some regulation” or “What if we didn’t execute a man by firing squad on live TV?!” I’m being facetious, obviously, but given a week, I’m pretty sure I could come up with some genuinely funny lines themed around those subjects. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people could. The real thing I’m offended by is that men are being paid big bucks for such mediocre efforts.
Perhaps, Shane Gillis might say to me, it’s actually the right time for backwards-looking, retrograde comedy, because it reflects the social reality of America: we’re going backwards. And when I say backwards, to be clear, I don’t mean backwards to the 1980s so much as I mean we’re going back to the sixteenth century, when public executions were normal and everybody knew a woman who had fourteen kids and spent most of her time baking bread. Women turn on the news in this country right now and routinely read about ICE agents shooting parents in the car with their five-year-olds, or students at Ivy League colleges being gang-raped, or another family annihilator who killed multiple generations in a mass shooting, or the president inviting Iran to nuke Los Angeles and San Diego. And amongst all of this horror — amongst all of this unrelenting bleakness, all of this working our butts off for salaries that don’t pay for our groceries or gas any longer, all of the worrying about gunmen and masked secret police-style agents on the streets and the looming possibility of World War Three — we turn on the TV at the end of the week and we don’t even get to laugh any more? The best they can scrape out the bottom of the barrel is a man who thinks gym shorts made of Spandex is new?
I believe in the ability of humor to pull us through our darkest times. And if I have to accept the signing away of my rights, then I’d at least like to be able to share in the joke. It is an insult to my intelligence to attempt to gaslight me into accepting that I actually don’t like the joke because I simply can’t handle “boundary-pushing” comedy.
Shane Gillis was visibly embarrassed after accidentally cursing on ‘Saturday Night Live’ (NBC)
I will say that I didn’t absolutely hate the rest of Gillis’s monologue. It was funny enough, and actually a lot of it did play with sexist tropes but in a much more well-observed and therefore humorous way. At one point, he recounted how Theo Von told him he looks like a gas station egg while he was sitting in the sauna and how that’s “one of the meanest things” anyone’s ever said to him. Similarly, that’s fairly funny. It also underlines how he could never make it as a woman, because I’ve had meaner things than that yelled at me through an open car window by high schoolers on my way to meetings, and it didn’t even mess up my Monday morning.
Probably the most relatable thing Gillis said was during a final segment about his receding hairline. “You’re either gay or Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?” was where that one ended up, which is true, really, isn’t it — you either get into bed with fascism these days or you’re a woke mind virus-spreading queer with a commie agenda and Pete Hegseth will kick you in the head, or at least performatively attempt a single pull-up in front of you while chugging a can of Huel. At least this is a joke that speaks to all of us and adequately pokes fun at the absurdity of the situation.
By far the actual funniest part of Gillis’s opener, however, was when he said his friend Joe Rogan has a private gym in Texas that he can go to, and then he did a little pause which clearly was intended to allow cheers for Joe Rogan and nobody — not even the people who enjoyed the “women as wh***s” segment — cheered. That moment did give me a smile.
Perhaps there’s hope for American society yet.