October 13 2026 - 10:00am
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Shane Gillis hosts Saturday Night Live, says something crude or politically incorrect, and critics clutch their pearls. The comic has now hosted SNL three times since he was fired by the show in 2019 after videos surfaced of him making racial slurs. We are therefore getting dangerously close to running out of ways to be shocked that Shane Gillis is hosting Saturday Night Live.
This time, the main offense was a monologue about female gym clothing. Gillis described women wearing revealing shorts while working out as looking like “whores”, prompting Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy to declare himself “speechless that something like that can exist on live national television”. Levy went on to connect complacency about misogyny with the conditions in which women are sexually assaulted. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti also posted a TikTok captioned “I am LIVID,” tying the joke to the investigation into a rape allegation at Cornell and announcing she didn’t want to hear that it was merely tone-deaf.
Shoehorning the Cornell story into a throwaway joke about women dressing scandalously at the gym is bewildering, of course. Still, it’s tempting to believe that Gillis — and SNL supremo Lorne Michaels — are intentionally courting controversy. Saturday’s seven-minute monologue included gags about the host’s weight making him look like a lesbian, a riff on the “gay” way to straighten your hair, and jokes that invoked Adolf Hitler and Joe Rogan (to some in liberal-land, there’s little distance between the two). By the end, it felt less like a set than a dare, with Gillis seeing how many taboo words he could cram into one monologue before somebody pulled the plug. And that’s not even counting an uncensored F-bomb he dropped during a Dr Seuss sketch for which he apologized at the end of the show.
Consider SNL’s long history of offensiveness. A little over 50 years ago, Chevy Chase shouted the N-word in a skit with black comic Richard Pryor. In May 1990, Michaels handed the show to swaggering shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, who was known for his brutal put-downs of women and minorities and explicit descriptions of sexual encounters. Back then, cast member Nora Dunn and the singer Sinéad O’Connor refused to appear, while gay rights and women’s groups rallied outside the studio. Next to the Diceman, Gillis’s aw-shucks act sounds extremely tame.
What was Michaels thinking? Nobody knows, and his inscrutability is a large part of his wizard-behind-the-curtain brand. The pattern, though, is hard to miss. He bucked conventional wisdom and booked Donald Trump to host in 2015 during the Republican’s presidential run. Michaels also booked Elon Musk in 2021, to the dismay of at least some of his own cast, and Dave Chappelle after the comedian’s Netflix specials had made him radioactive on the Left. Each time, the people who feel the show belongs to the liberal consensus reacted with fury, and each time the show carried on.
For Michaels, this could be calculation, mischief, or a long-running ambivalence about heading up an establishment institution. Probably, it is all three. Whatever the motive, the effect is that every year or two the show reconnects with its countercultural roots, as the sketch show began as a kind of middle finger to the establishment in the Seventies.
The real failure on Saturday night was familiar enough to anyone who watches SNL: too much of the material simply wasn’t funny. Gillis can be amusing in skits such as his inspired “Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning” faux ad, but his monologue was weak. It’s fine if Michaels keeps throwing curveballs, but it would be nice if more of them were hit for strikes.
