Why Shane Gillis’s SNL Monologue Felt So Weird

(Finally, a white guy weighs in on the comedic stylings of Shane Gillis)

Hello and welcome to the 6 new subscribers since my last email, in which I memorialized @NBACentel, before it got revived. For those loosely following that story, the X account has gained 150,000+ followers in the four days since its resurrection.

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Today I want to talk about Shane Gillis’ opening monologue on Saturday Night Live over the weekend. If you didn’t catch it yet, I encourage you to give it a watch:

Gillis hosting SNL for the second time in the past year wasn’t just a full-circle moment – it was a rare, unfiltered look at what seeing live stand-up comedy actually feels like in 2025.

Not the polished-for-Netflix version.

Not the clipped-for-TikTok version.

The unpredictable, reactive, occasionally messy, wonderfully alive, real thing.

Reception, however, both in the room and online, appears to be extremely split.

Fans of the show were expecting a precise, scripted standup set.

Instead, they got a clown number.

I can explain.

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In clowning, there’s a term frequently used called being “in the shit”.

It occurs directly after a performer is caught on stage with material that is flat-out not working.

We see them stuck in a bit that isn’t landing, and that moment of crisis or embarrassment gets plastered across their face.

In that moment, they would be considered, “in the shit”.

The standup would label a set where this happens over and over a “bomb”. Because they aren’t receiving laughter in the pockets of space intentionally left for them.

But the best clowns deliberately put themselves in the shit, over and over again.

Unlike the standup, who has no choice other than to stick to their script of prepared jokes, the clown is encouraged to play with this tension. Instead of panicking, instead of pretending it’s all going according to plan, they lean into being “in the shit”.

They don’t care why you’re laughing. Just that you’re laughing. Because you’re at a comedy show, and the clown is tasked with making you laugh. They acknowledge their flops, and comment when it’s not going well. And so their vulnerability leads to your laughter. The audience isn’t just riding shotgun, they share the steering wheel.

That’s what Gillis was doing here, the way I see it.

The most concise summary of this eight-minute set is: Gillis proposes an idea, the audience gives back nothing in return, Gillis gets put in the shit.

Flop, attempt to save. Flop, attempt to save.

Over and over and over.

He did the same thing when he hosted SNL for the first time, last February:

Maybe I’ve seen too much clowning to view live comedy through any other prism at this point, but I find this lens of performance analysis way more interesting than watching someone rattle off their tried-and-true material in exchange for the same, predictable laughter in the same, predictable places.

For instance, pay attention to the section from 1:48-2:23, where Shane makes fun of his dad for being a volunteer Assistant Girls High School Basketball Coach.

The camera cuts to his parents sitting in the crowd, which adds yet another layer to empathizing with Shane’s vulnerability for the viewer.

He’s attempting these jokes at a place that fired him in front of his parents!

He boldly doubles down, and comments on how the joke about his dad is going 3-4 times, but the crowd doesn’t give him the reaction he was hoping for.

It’s almost like you can feel the audience thinking, “Is it sexist if I laugh at this joke? Well I’m definitely not a sexist, so I can’t laugh here”, rather than laughing at the beautiful idiocy on display in front of them.

There’s a lot to laugh at here!!

Like how they set up a camera to get a shot of Shane’s dad just so he could bully him on live television. Or the fact that he likely already said and did all of this in a dress rehearsal, several hours prior. Or the fact that this is what he had planned for his triumphant debut on the legendary show that infamously canned him, five years later.

But this style of interaction and laughter only works when the audience is ready for it.

And that’s where the disconnect happened.

There’s this assumption that a live audience reaction is the ultimate barometer for whether something works. But the SNL live taping audience is not exactly a middle-school math textbook problem in terms of its diversity.

And I’m not even talking about diversity in pigment or gender or anything like that.

I’m talking about diversity of understanding differing comedic styles.

If you’re the kind of SNL fan who attends a live taping, you’re likely there for a specific kind of comedy: a slate of left-of-center sketches and character-based bits. Perhaps you’ll see some recurring or familiar ones. And you definitely call them, “skits”.

Gillis, on the other hand, performs with the room, not to it.

And when a crowd isn’t used to that – when they expect a monologue and instead get invited to participate in a conversation – it can throw them off.

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But the reason his material gets so scrutinized, the reason Gillis still carries a certain baggage with people – many of whom have never actually watched his Netflix comedy special or TV series Tires – has nothing to do with his performance style.

Ever since he got fired from SNL before ever appearing in an episode of the show, Gillis has been painted a certain way by the media.

That he’s some right-wing grifter, and his supporters are one big pledge class rushing ΓOP.

For better or for worse, people come to all sorts of conclusions about Gillis, his fans, and their politics before he even opens his mouth, and then use all sorts of confirmation bias to support their preconceived ideas of him.

It’s easy to envision why people jump to those conclusions. He makes the kind of jokes that, on paper, can read as out-of-step with progressive comedy norms.

But I’d argue it’s actually those progressive comedy norms that are out-of-step with the comedic sensibilities of Gillis and his fans, and the ticket data backs that up.

A quick scroll through his upcoming arena (!!!) tour dates will result in seeing a lot of:

His April schedule resembles the Chicago Bulls’ more closely than it does a comedian’s:

The truth is, Gillis isn’t some culture warrior.

Believe it or not, laughing at something someone else says does not equal an endorsement of the entire belief system that you’ve projected onto that person.

His whole thing – the entire appeal – is that he’s just…

A guy.

He’s not up there waving a flag for one side or the other. He’s not selling some abhorrent ideology. He’s not spearheading a movement of incel misogynists.

The hardest laughs for me at this weekend’s monologue weren’t even because of his “points”, nor because I “agree” with the “implications” of the “subtext” of the material.

They come at the expense of his sheepishness at 0:48 and 0:56, when a joke didn’t quite hit. Or at the way he prefaces, “Alright, now I’m going to lose you even more,” at the 2:34 mark, and, “Now that I’ve got your attention…” at the 4:07 mark.

Laughing at this poor idiot’s situation.

It was literally just a guy, on stage, trying some stuff out.

Painfully sensitive to how well it wasn’t going.

Putting himself in the shit, over and over again.

And if you can overcome the impulse to label everything as either categorically good or evil, past the urge to place everyone else into predefined teams, and not view every punchline through the lens of your own moral Sorting Hat before deciding if it’s safe enough to have a primal reaction to, you might be able to see the beauty in that.