Why the Shane Gillis SNL Conversation is Dominated by People Who Hate Comedy

Who Is SNL’s Audience, Anyway?

Sometimes culture moves in a way that blindsides me. For instance, I actually saw the now INFAMOUS Shane Gillis SNL monologue before it became an object of apparent viral controversy. It wasn’t the funniest thing I ever watched, but parts of it made me laugh. It didn’t occur to me that this would trigger a Big National Conversation over Gillis’ “women just dress like whores now” at the gym riff. In full context, he was mostly mocking himself for looking like a gross creep. It was a totally fine standup monologue that the audience seemed to enjoy well enough. But apparently that audience, presumably present to enjoy comedy, isn’t the audience that counts.

One of the deranging features of culture right now is that everyone is so inundated with information that it’s easy to muddy the waters with inaccurate frame jobs. For example, Variety posted this misleading headline:

Gillis Bombs ‘SNL’ Monologue (Again): ‘You’re Either Gay or You’re Hitler’

“Bombs” is subjective, but if you actually watched the set, the crowd was laughing throughout. Gillis ended the act a bit abruptly, in the awkward manner I sometimes wrap a podcast, so the dismount off the routine wasn’t exactly pristine. But overall, in that setting, a solid set.

If you read this headline on social media though, you’re led to believe the viewing experience was far more uncomfortable than it actually was. You then operate with the baked-in assumption that the offensive comic was overtly rebuked as unfunny by the SNL crowd. Maybe that gives you a bit of social proof confidence in joining a pile-on against the comedian, as some celebrities did.

Here’s another example: The Buzzing Pop account (286K followers) got traction with the following post. As of this time, it’s racked up over 11 million views on X.

Shane Gillis bombs #SNL monologue with cheap shots at women: “Also, I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like wh*res now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. You’ve seen the shorts? They’re those neon, like, artificial vape-colored [shorts], and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butth*le. And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming. I’m in the background of ten TikToks right now.”

There’s that “bombs” word again. The irony of that account’s inclusion of these supposedly damning quotes is that Gillis’ “I’m in the background of ten TikToks right now” line got one of the biggest laughs of the set. But the core truth doesn’t really matter in these viral outrages. Part of our present collapse means you can simply lie about the present because there’s too much going on for most people to check in on the original source.

We’ve had viral social media outrage for some time now, but I’d say incidents like this almost represent a new phase in the stupidity. Obviously, publications can spread engagement-seeking misrepresentations about complicated events like war and political disputes. That makes sense because these situations are inherently complicated. The average person can’t be expected to get to the root of these conflicts on foreign lands or within the halls of Washington D.C.

But we’ve now reached a point where you can caption a video with a misleading headline, and the overwhelming response will be driven by the wrong framing of a video everyone can see for themselves. We’ve gone from, “Nobody will bother to read the original book,” to “Nobody will bother to read the original article,” and now are squarely in, “Nobody will even bother to watch the short video clip staring them right in the face.”

At least on Twitter/X, which is still, primarily, a shared text medium, some people will offer visible corrections to a white hot narrative. God only knows what’s happening on the other post-literate social media platforms. I’ve had multiple people reach out to tell me they were surprised about the contents of my Cornell 7 conversation with Kat Rosenfield because they’d purely absorbed the scandal via Instagram. These were all, to a person, highly educated individuals who passively received a horrifyingly cartoonish version of events as 100 percent accurate. They weren’t mad about what they listened to in the podcast, or at least mad at us. They were mostly shocked at how deceived they were by a very authoritative sounding public “conversation.”

There are media members who are connecting the Cornell incident to the Shane Gillis set, which is partially how the modern conversation gets so deranged. From a “TV and labor reporter” at Deadline:

We are in the middle of one of the largest nationwide reckonings with sexual assault ever and this guy gets on stage and calls women whores for wearing shorts at the gym? You think he doesn’t know what he is saying? It’s not only unoriginal and unfunny, it’s really disgusting.

So we are having a nationwide “reckoning” over a disputed incident in Ithaca that many are discussing based on online rumors, and this then should inform our response to a comedy set that many are discussing absent actually watching the material. There’s a cart before the horse dynamic where the social outrage precedes understanding of the supposed reality driving it. Or, to quote a few of my subscribers, in response to a lot of my articles: Maybe the internet was a mistake.

Everything is everything now, and one consequence of that is that, perhaps, nothing is anything. If the core “truth” of an event is received only as what preferred narrative it drives, reality loses traction. Another externality of everything being everything is that we lose sight of who the actual audience is for anything.

With that in mind, there was an article in The Hollywood Reporter titled, “Shane Gillis’ ‘SNL’ Monologue Was Wrong Place, Wrong Time (Again)” that rested on a curious premise. The piece was well-written, and not entirely wrong on all counts, but I’d argue that it was conflating “audience” with “internet people.”

SNL attracts liberal talent and a similar audience. It films in New York City and its main target is Donald Trump. The show’s writers and cast members are generally a diverse group of Gen Z-ers that came up in improv, sketch and standup comedy. They don’t listen to Joe Rogan — Gillis’ buddy who, along with Theo Von (and Dan Soder, kind of) got a shoutout in the set — and they don’t drink the Bud Light Gillis endorses. Studio 8H is not the place for gay jokes and jokes against women — at the very least, if you try them, they’d better be really strong. Gillis’ were not.

Shane Gillis, not a Trump voter, mocks Donald Trump frequently with his dead-on impression, but I digress. I do agree with this framing that SNL cast members are largely theater kids who differ culturally from Gillis.

Comedy is about pushing boundaries, and Gillis is really good at that. His substantial, Guinness Book-sized audience is anti-woke, which is actually a pretty logical (though rare) position for comedians. The same material would probably kill with a Gillis crowd, though those probably do not have a ton of crossover with your average SNL viewer.

This is Gillis’ third appearance on SNL, which would be a difficult feat to pull off without some evidence that he’s resonating with SNL viewers. The sacrilegious monologue has racked up millions of views on YouTube, though you could argue that’s owed to bad publicity. But more to the point, I’m not seeing a lot of outraged influencers prefacing comments with, “As a loyal Saturday Night Live viewer.” They’re just angry, and this is something the algorithm served up as anger-worthy. These largely aren’t comedy fans. These are fans of viral outrage.

What I’m saying is that The Hollywood Reporter article suggests the main issue is that Gillis is wrong for an audience that isn’t the one primarily driving this firestorm THR is reacting to. SNL is a comedy show and Shane Gillis is one of the hottest comedians in America. If he’s not right for this program, then maybe SNL should be defined as something other than “comedy.” A small smattering of critics can gather every Saturday night to behold the rebranded, “Culturally Approved Commentary Show.”

I’ve said before that the only people left to sit down and type edited words about comedy are vegans commissioned to assess steakhouses. It’s shifted to where they don’t even sit down in the steakhouse. They just rant about the horrors they hear went on in there. They saw on TikTok that the steak happened to be especially disgusting, bloody, steak. Since nothing is compartmentalized now, they believe their opinions should dictate what everyone else gets to eat.