The Shane Gillis SNL Backlash Is Really Stupid

Shane Gillis is an actor and comedian. He first came to my attention in September 2019, when he was hired to be a new cast member on Saturday Night Live—and then abruptly fired after it was revealed that he had (gasp) told offensive jokes. (SNL creator Lorne Michaels subsequently said that the network forced him to fire Gillis, and he thought the whole controversy was stupid.)

Since then, Gillis’s career has really taken off, to the extent that he has repeatedly returned to SNL as a guest host. He did so again on October 10, delivering a monologue in which he made the following observation: “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now.”

Shane Gillis’ monologue! pic.twitter.com/ky6fVtWBx9

— Saturday Night Live (@nbcsnl) October 11, 2026

Some people are really mad about that joke, including the actor Dan Levy, who called Gillis a misogynist and implied that this sort of joke was emboldening men to treat women as objects—and to sexually assault them.

“It’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted,” said Levy.

He was not the only one to make this claim. On The View, Sara Haines echoed Levy’s criticism and said that such language—the word whore in particular—was demeaning.

“I’m not saying a joke makes an assault, but it makes it much easier to look at another human as an object,” she said.

This is unpersuasive.

I might understand why people would take offense if Gillis consistently singled out women for unrelenting abuse. When it comes to humor, context is everything, and a harmless joke can come off as mean-spirited if it seems targeted.

But in that very same monologue, Gillis denigrates men, gay men, his sisters, and himself—repeatedly. He admits that he’s fat and ugly. That’s the basis of the humor. It does not suggest that he has some problem with women or enjoys laughing at their expense and solely their expense. He’s doing observational comedy, and no one is spared, not even Gillis. He even makes a joke about how he might unintentionally come off as threatening to women, because he’s a big ugly guy.

It would be weird if women wearing skin-tight clothing at the gym was for some reason an off-limits subject for comedians. Why? It’s OK to insult men’s appearance, but not women’s? Is that really the standard? Of course not.

Indeed, it is trivially easy to find examples of liberal-coded comedians (Gillis is one of those right-coded, anti–political correctness, Joe Rogan types), mocking the appearances of specific women. Jimmy Kimmel’s recent monologue went after Katie Zacharia, the Trump administration’s new press secretary, for her looks. Kimmel insinuated that she’s a dumb blonde who was picked just because she’s attractive. He even showed a photo of her at the gym, dressed semi-provocatively!

You know how the left is trying to cancel Shane Gillis for his SNL remarks about women at the gym, well, Jimmy Kimmel puts up a picture of Katie Zacharia at the gym, “Oh, wait, just kidding. This is the new press secretary, former Newsmax commentator Katie Zacharia, seen here,… pic.twitter.com/ANYeqhfVev

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) October 13, 2026

Was Kimmel inviting sexual violence against Zacharia? Of course not. It would be ludicrous to pretend that this joke was somehow out of bounds.

The same goes for Gillis, though.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that Gillis’s brand of humor just isn’t a good fit for SNL, which has become a show by liberals, for liberals, and aimed at skewering the Trump administration. That’s fair enough: Personally, I didn’t think the Gillis monologue was particularly funny, though I am well-accustomed to consuming SNL in stone-faced silence. I find about 99 percent of the skits are cringe and humorless. It’s not for me.

But I do object to the assertion that a one-off joke about the way women dress is out of bounds. I thought we all agreed that Woke 1 was crazy?

The post The Shane Gillis SNL Backlash Is Really Stupid appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/10/13/the-shane-gillis-snl-backlash-is-really-stupid/