Shane Gillis was fired five years ago from SNL before he was able to appear on a single episode of the show. I don’t like or dislike him, but I’ve watched with intense fascination at the internet chatter since he was first announced to host the February 24th show.
His presence is the perfect geopolitical chokepoint upon which cancel culture, political correctness, and capitalism comes into play.
When analyzing this episode, there are two things at play.
One is where he first in the whole culture wars narratives. Was it a backwards or offensive move? The second is along the lines of whether he was talented enough to merit a spot on the show and whether he delivered on that end.
Most of those entertainment journalists who have covered the shane Gillis controversy have a lifetime of advocating from an extremely social justice warrior based perspective. The writing staffs at sites like Indiewire, Rogerebert, The A.V. Club, Slate, and Vox (which did a particularly scathing piece on him) are full of people who have spent their writing careers as a platform to boost and protect the margianalized, so they will come at it from a certain angle.
As I’ve said before, SNL is an institution because it has maintained credibility as an institution. Part of that institutional practice (AKA whatever goes on in Lorne Michael’s head) is that the show includes voices from every side of the aisle. The show would completely lose its edge if it didn’t, and comedy has to push the envelope. The same boundary-pushing attitude that allowed them to hire queer comedians like Terry Sweeney, Kate McKinnon, Punkie Johnson, and Bowie Yang, or body-positive comedians like Aidy Bryant, is the same kind of ethos that would allow for the invitations for people like Dave Chapelle and Gillis to host.
Some might call this an annoying habit of courting controversy, as Judy Berman writes for Time. This is not an illegitimate claim: Art and commerce can’t be divorced from each other, either. One can also make the case that when SNL makes bookings outside the realm of entertainment voices, it can negatively affect the world like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. However, people like Gillis simply are people who present ideas. Audiences shouldn’t be afraid of those ideas being voiced out loud on TV. The kinds of people who don’t like whatever they think Shane Gillis represents (more on that later) have plenty of avenues to voice that, and many powerful allies in the media who will pick up that baton.
As for what Shane Gillis represents, he is very likely a democrat (or at the very least apolitical), even if his defining moment in the public sphere to audiences who aren’t comedy nerds was as an example of cancel culture.
The idea that Shane Gillis has grown as a person and reconciled is one reason that he has become more palatable.
While one can always judge the sincerity of the apologies or the growth of Shane Gillis, there’s a habit of hashtag warriors to judge apologies as insincere no matter what. So I’m inclined to give Gillis the benefit of the doubt. As any couples therapist or workplace conflict mediator can tell you, it’s never a helpful to try to measure the sincerity of apologizes and assume what’s in the person’s head when they make it. It’s very much an act of projection with celebrity culture that today’s followers of celebrity feel they can act out these complicated mental states through their celebrity scapegoat of the week.
In recent interviews, Gillis has mentioned attempts to detach himself as a poster boy for Conservative fans, friendships with figures such as Andrew Yang, and that he’s trying hard to not use offensive language (the thing that first got him in trouble).
To a zoomer, this seems laughable. They likely have been raised in places with zero policies towards offensive language and have been trained to villainize minor slights as hate speech. Again, this is not so much an indication that Shane Gillis is horrible, but that generational differences can train us to not recognize the growth in another person if they’re so far behind us on (our own self-defined) bell curves.
It’s helpful to recognize that Shane Gillis’s attempts to be a decent person will still be judged by anyone on the internet who think he’s a good enough ally. We are free to judge him as bigoted, but that might not be the most accurate view of who he is if we’re not careful with context. On the contrary, there has been audience pressure for him over the last five years to lean into stereotypes and offensiveness. Many comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Aziz Ansari, and especially Louis C.K. have gone harsher into attack mode at woke audiences after they’ve been cancelled. For his part, Gillis at least deserves credit for sticking to his funny bone.
As for whether the episode was a failure, there were sketches that might have been seen as problematic. There was a sketch with misguided employees who didn’t understand sexual harrassment in a meeting with H.R.
It played off the image that Gillis was politically backwards. At the same time, Gillis didn’t play the only character in the sketch with questionable morals. The sketch never condoned anyone’s wrong-headed views, and it’s target squared with the voices of reason in the HR characters (Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman). The main comic premise was how frustrating sexual harrassment seminars must be for the presenters. It’s a fairly soft space in which to make edgy jokes since the audience is clearly on the right side of the moral equation.
The sketches varied in terms of offense. One sketch premise involved Jamaican accents and some might have found the cultural appropriation aspect unfunny when Shane Gillis couldn’t stop himself from speaking in a Jamaican accent. However, if that criticism is widespread (I haven’t seen anything in the reviews so far), I’d maintain that it comes from criticizing comedy without context. Here, the comic premise wasn’t about how a Jamaican patois sounds funny. Instead, it’s about the awkwardness of a White man in a Jamaican Church.
This school of criticism of judging comedy without context has been pretty prevalent since around 2015. As someone who’s not a fan of people overusing “cultural appropriation” or “white savior” criticisms, it’s extremely refreshing for Shane Gillis to be on the show skirting the line of political correctness.
However, it should be noted that all of this is moot because SNL is never written by the host of the week. Everything said in sketches was heavily scripted by a writing room that's heavily staffed with female and queer writers. In the last decade, female writers Sudi Green, Allison Gates, Anna Drezen, and Sarah Schneider have all held head writer positions on the show and the non-binary writer Celeste Yim got promoted to writing supervisor. Three of this season’s new hires — KC Shornima, Asha Ward, and Auguste White — are women of color as well.
Last season, this Try Guys sketch was heavily criticized for brushing off the power dynamics in a buzzworthy internet conflict (a semi-famous content creator being fired from one of YouTube’s big channels for cheating on his wife). It later came out that one of the writers of the sketch (Will Stephen) went to college with the content creator in question. What the media didn’t focus on as much was that the sketch was also written by Celeste Yim and Bowen Yang as well. It’s easy to pass the show’s more offensive moments onto the least margianalized writer (Stephen is White) but SNL has always been a group effort.
The only think that Shane really did as Shane was his monologue. In my opinion, this was underwhelming, which seems to echo much of the internet reaction. In that sense, he might have “bombed” but that is different than being deliberately offensive in an Andrew Dice Clay kind of way.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for all the hooplah around the episode and preceding hype, I found the experience of Shane Gillis highly cathartic. Rather than witness the divisive impulses of cancel culture, I watched a guy clean up his reputation, be accepted by his peers and have them make art together. I believe the generation below me thrives on criticism, but collaboration and happy endings warms my heart more.
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