In 2019, comedian Shane Gillis was announced as part of the new generation of cast members joining Saturday Night Live, alongside Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman. But before he could make his debut, Gillis — then a fresh-faced 31-year-old stand-up and podcaster from Pennsylvania — was fired over resurfaced clips of him using anti-Asian slurs and making homophobic jokes. Gillis apologized at the time, stating he was “a comedian who pushes boundaries” but one who “sometimes misses.”
Yet that fallout didn’t stop SNL from inviting him back — three separate times. His latest appearance this past Saturday night ignited opprobrium when, during a bro-y stand-up opening monologue, he joked that women at the gym “now dress like wh***s.” “Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. You’ve seen the shorts?” he asked the audience, though it felt like he was only talking to the men in the room. He said women in the gym wear neon shorts with wrinkles that go “around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look…because they’re filming!”
The joke felt so overtly misogynistic I had to double-check the date: was this 2006 or 2026? Commentators noted that the material was especially tone-deaf given the national conversation surrounding the Cornell 7 case — the 2024 gang rape allegations involving seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University — which SNL had addressed sensitively during Weekend Update just the week prior. Schitt’s Creek creator Dan Levy was among those criticizing Gillis’s monologue, posting on Monday: “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them wh***s; it makes the men calling them wh***s misogynists…I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television, and to be honest more men need to be standing up in opposition to it.”
If Gillis provokes such controversy, why on earth does SNL keep inviting him back?
For one, Gillis is close with SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who expressed frustration when NBC made the decision to fire the comedian in 2019. “He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “I was angry. I thought, ‘You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing.’” Michaels made clear that the decision came from network executives rather than himself.
Gillis was also invited back because his commercial success is pretty undeniable. He’s one of the most popular touring stand-up comedians in the U.S. right now. His career has grown fast, perhaps thanks in part to his high-profile SNL firing. He’s had a 2023 Netflix special, Beautiful Dogs (his debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, has 58 million views on the platform). He has 3 million Instagram followers. He co-hosts the top comedy podcast with Matt McCusker, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. He also co-wrote and stars in Netflix’s workplace comedy Tires, set at a fictional family-run auto shop, which earned a multi-season renewal alongside a broader production and stand-up deal with the streamer. His comedy style makes him extremely likable; he speaks to the crowd as if he’s messing around with his friends. Gillis is clever and dumb at the same time, in a way that makes him somewhat endearing.
The comedy in Saturday night’s monologue was very much Gillis’s brand. He combines brash anti-wokeness with heavy doses of self-deprecating jokes and a type of self-awareness that props up his everyman persona. In the opening monologue alone, he joked about growing up being bullied by his “two big fat b**** sisters” and his receding hairline that he claimed makes him look either “gay” or like Hitler. He also recounted being told he looked like a “gas station egg” during a sauna hangout session with his mates Theo Von and Joe Rogan — an anecdote hardly tailored to SNL’s progressive demographic.
Host monologues should theoretically be smooth sailing for stand-up comedians, who dedicate their careers to getting laughs out of live audiences. But professional comedians are also judged more harshly, compared to, say, pop star Harry Styles when he’s on hosting duties. Gillis has been accused of bombing before — the comedian term for failing to make the audience laugh — when he hosted for the first time in 2024, and again in 2025. During both appearances, he received significant social media backlash from viewers who weren't happy that he joked about Down syndrome, compared liberals to Star Wars villains and so forth (you get the gist). On Saturday, he accidentally dropped an F-bomb during a sketch based on Dr. Seuss, and painstakingly read from a teleprompter afterwards. He apologized to the audience for swearing later on in the show, and TMZ reports today that the blunder won’t prevent him from being invited back again (The Independent has contacted NBC for comment).
Yet the accidental F-bomb wasn’t the most controversial part.
The joke about gym attire struck such a chord because acts of violence against women and girls are often blamed on what the victim is wearing or doing, rather than the acts of the perpetrator themselves. And it’s worth pointing out that the gym is an extremely difficult place for women to be comfortable. Personally, I take months to get comfortable when I join a new gym, mainly because I’m sussing out whether I need to keep a wide berth from any of the male members who may reveal themselves to be professional mansplainers or creeps. And I’d say that for every pair of neon shorts I’ve seen in the gym, I’ve probably seen a dozen more male nipples. If I were to be really granular about it, I’d say that Gillis’s observation in itself shows just how much women are being watched and monitored in gyms. It is cheap humor. And while the monologue may have landed a decade ago, it feels distinctly out of place today.
At a time when headlines are dominated by serious discussions around consent and violence against women, it remains baffling how a joke built around calling women “w****s” for wearing activewear made it onto primetime national television. But if you’ve got the backing of comedy’s holy duo Lorne Michaels and Joe Rogan, the invitation will be extended again and again.
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