The Hollywood Reporter dispatched its senior editor of diversity and inclusion — you ever wonder why so many publications fail? — to review Shane Gillis on Saturday Night Live as “meh.”
The Daily Beast and NPR declared that Gillis “bombed.”
The latter’s Eric Deggans begrudgingly called Saturday’s “an okay episode” and gleefully dubbed Gillis “a middling talent.” The former’s Michael Boyle complained, “It seemed like SNL was engaging in its yearly cynical ratings ploy of platforming a controversial right-wing figure, regardless of what its regular audience members think.”
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Gillis, like Elon Musk, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Chappelle before him, did not support Donald Trump. Instead, like them, he ran afoul of the thought police by recalcitrantly not embracing every progressive tenet. For this, NPR and its ilk label him and the lot of them “right-wing.” For this, NPR and its ilk reflexively pan their SNL appearances.
Their reviews fail for the same reason Saturday Night Live habitually does. We know the article before we read it, and we know the joke before they tell it.
Jokes are like ambushes. They rely on the element of surprise to work.
Shane Gillis succeeded on Saturday because he put the “live” into Saturday Night Live. Two minutes into his monologue, one might forgive the viewer for sensing the host nervous and his standup flailing. Then he used his mother as a prop.
“My mom asked me, she’s like, ‘When did we stop being best friends?’” he explained to the crowd surrounding his mom. “And she’s right, we used to be best friends. You remember when you were a little boy and you’re like — you love your mom and you thought she was the cool — you remember when you were gay?”
Then he pivoted to talk about his niece with Down syndrome, how the condition “nicked” him, and the slow service at the coffee shop that his family opened employing mentally challenged workers.
When Chloe Troast played Elise Stefanik as the villain questioning Ivy League presidents months back, it came across as the rote liberalism the show strangely has become known for in the last decade. The design seemed not to promote laughter but to nudge viewers toward a correct opinion. Saturday night’s host put comedy first on a program that routinely corrupts its purpose by regarding politics as the prime objective. (RELATED: I Miss Comedy in America. Just Look at Saturday Night Live.)
Gillis, who resembles every bowler ever, shocked in not using bumper rails. That his set followed cast regulars — relying on a script drawn from actual quotations that made the skit, like so much else on the show, seem more journalism than humor — playing Republicans afraid to criticize Donald Trump in a hackneyed cold-open almost designed to sabotage the host in repulsing his audience actually amplified Gillis’ reorientation of the program in his monologue.
In the bits that followed, Gillis imitated Trump far better than the show’s house impersonator, hilariously played Forrest Gump’s high school bully at their class reunion, and, in the best skit of the night, portrayed a socially clueless employee at an office sexual harassment workshop. Even his fake ad cut from the broadcast — a parody of LiMu Emu & Doug as dirty cops — bested the stale material normally featured on the program.
Nearly five years ago, after Saturday Night Live embraced cancel culture in firing Gillis four days after they hired him, show alum Norm Macdonald repeatedly torched the failed comedian who dredged up Gillis’ edgy podcast material to secure his termination. An NBC executive similarly, and famously, canned Macdonald for broaching a subject he wanted him to avoid. And Norm, like Shane, redemptively returned to host the show.
Unfortunately, the older comic did not live to see the younger standup’s triumph. He did, however, predict it.
“In a war for comedy,” Macdonald privately messaged Gillis during his ordeal, “I think the ones with jokes will win.”
The jokes won on Saturday night.
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