Lorne Michaels Commands We Watch Shane Gillis on SNL Again

And Your Host…

A running theme amidst the months-long celebration of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary has been the myth of Lorne Michaels. I say myth not as a negative, necessarily—a half-century of expended ink, celluloid, and cultural analysis is going to coalesce around a narrative, and Michaels’ place in TV history invites hyperbole. When you have scores of very talented writers and performers telling your story, you’re going to come off in outsized terms.

But movies like Jason Reitman’s clumsily worshipful, reality-challenged Saturday Night portray Michaels as TV comedy rebel, springing fully formed as standard bearer for defiance in the face of old school philistinism, censorship, and those who just don’t get it, man. And while there’s some truth buried among the decades of hagiography, the legacy of the now octogenarian icon has taken its share of hits. Dotted around the pointillist portrait of Michaels as comedy visionary are the times when Michaels’ stubbornness stemmed less from principle than from lordly “How dare you question me?” self-regard.

Enter Shane Gillis, now hosting for the second time since he was hired and fired pretty much simultaneously back in 2019 after it was revealed that SNL under Michaels stewardship had apparently done little to no vetting of its potential cast members’ social media, podcast appearances, stand-up, or widely available public statements. (Or didn’t think they were a problem, which is worse, question mark?) The show’s initial sheepish retreat from the then less known stand-up after his loathsome comments about [checks notes] everyone you’d expect gradually gave way to Michaels’ retrenchment as one of those aging comedy icons whose complaints about the woke mob (who Michaels recently compared to the Reign of Terror, which carries its own self-own) proved a serious bummer. (Bless you, Eric Idle, for bucking that trend at least.) Again, how dare we.

As a host, Gillis has now twice proven incontrovertibly that he’d have been a bust on SNL. Stolid, lumpish, and lacking any sort of screen presence, Gillis’ every appearance tonight marked him out as singularly unsuited to the show, with two hosting stints’ worth of sketches likely representing more than the number he’d have gotten in a full season as one-and-done featured player. Adding to the discomfort of watching Gillis flounder was the awkward added tension of viewers’ antennae bleeping whenever a sketch veered into uncomfortable territory.

I love uncomfortable comedy. Saturday Night Live should be much more willing to make viewers feel that “where are they going with this?” tingle when sketches edge into areas like race, homophobia, and misogyny, as several did tonight. The newscast sketch didn’t break any new ground in its depiction of a mixed, four-person news team (Ego Nwodim and Kenan Thompson vs. Gillis and Heidi Gardner, with traffic chopper guy Devon Walker as floater) openly rooting for each crime story’s suspect to be of the opposite race, but it’s a fine foundation for some social satire. With Gillis plunked in the mix, however, the discomfort was less about the well-worn premise (seriously, I’m pretty sure the Barney Miller pilot did something similar) than about queasily wondering about how Gillis’ presence informed the piece’s “both-sides are racist” false equivalency.

Now, Michael was likely looking for just that sort of comic tension when initially hiring the right-wing comic in the first place. Lorne has long held that Saturday Night Live is “non-partisan,” a questionable stance that’s only become more indicative of where the aging, increasingly conservative Michaels’ sensibilities truly lie. Could SNL do with being more inclusive in its point of view? Sure—although perhaps bringing a boorish bro mediocrity like Gillis into a show whose history of presenting sketch comedy from a baseline of self-satisfied whiteness (straight-ness, maleness) isn’t as edgy as Michaels imagined.

Look, I’m not a Shane Gillis fan. His monologue, like last time he hosted, was a bland mush of feeble provocations peppered with red-faced, giggling asides to let everybody know he wasn’t playing to his normal crowd. “You guys are pretty liberal here” was Gillis’ fumbling rejoinder after one of his “Joe Biden sure was old” jokes got little response, but it’s a well he went to often when things bombed. (“I don’t know how to get out of this joke,” he noted at another point, betraying the comic’s signature klutzy lack of polish.) Putting the hot TV lights on Gillis wilted him, although he can now excuse his failure as being in enemy territory when he retreats back to his more comfy and insular podcast den.

But even as a button-pusher, Gillis’ lack of confidence and stage presence worked against him. If Gillis comparing liberals’ supposed knee-jerk reactionary response to his material (yeah, those darn liberals are just like the Sith lords), and a joke about using Ken Burns’ Civil War like Bill Cosby used roofies were delivered with conviction, they’d still suck, but at least they wouldn’t come off like the mumbled asides of a bully afraid of the schoolyard he finds himself in.

Having Shane Gillis on for a second time is Lorne Michaels f*ck you to anybody who dared. In that recent interview, Michael said of Gillis’ firing, that Gillis had been unfairly “beaten up for things he said years earlier.” Now I don’t have a major movie made about me as arbiter of comedy or anything, but Michaels’ statement glosses over how absolutely sh*tty and hateful Gillis’ “jokes” were and the fact that he was a fully formed adult when he said them—and how the comic has done nothing but make serious bank (his beer commercial alongside Post Malone played twice tonight) saying the exact same sh*t any chance he gets. Shane Gillis hasn’t changed. SNL and Michaels have just decided that he’s acceptable now.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: In a pretty dire show with or without Gillis, I’m going to give it up for a single performance. Emil Wakim is a very good sketch actor. The doctor’s visit started out queasy—it’s not my fault that having Shane Gillis’ patient confronted by a doctor named Bashar had me fearing the worst. And the central joke—that former middle school classmate Wakim was notorious for once sucking his own dick at a pool party—also wasn’t super-promising. But damned i f Wakim didn’t turn the doc’s eventual ownership of his long-ago infamy into a self-contained little tour de force, his character’s mounting reverie about the lost pleasures of contortionist self-pleasure (“I was 3’9″, I could have sucked anything on my whole body”) transforming into the sort of improbably memorable turn only a real sketch actor can provide.

With SNL 50 heading into next year with a lot of cast uncertainty, my money’s on featured player dark horses Wakim and Ashley Padilla to step up and start carrying some pieces. Both have the sketch comedy gene, the ineffable ability to walk into a flimsy premise somehow fully formed. That singular quality goes a long way on SNL, and I’m betting on these two.

The Worst: Gillis, on the other hand, showed what happens when a thin sketch is anchored by a sketch nonentity. Coming right after the monologue no less, the selfie sketch suffered a show-crippling death in part thanks to Gillis anchoring it like, well, an anchor. The joke that Heidi Gardner’s girlfriend, on a vineyard tour with Gillis’ WASP-y parents, makes lots (and lots) of silly poses and faces while demanding a raft of selfies from boyfriend Gillis, isn’t much—Gardner mugs her heart out, but this isn’t one of her stellar characterizations. But she’s Gilda Radner next to Gillis, whose discomfiture comes off less like the character’s and more like Gillis’ as he attempts to placate his demanding new girl’s photo self-obsession. When Gardner orders him to smile like he has an egg in his mouth and to “smile with your nose,” what could be the invitation for some decent physical comedy feels more like Gillis being even more lost than his character. As a rule, don’t put your sweatiest, lest confident piece right up top.

The Rest: In his monologue, Gillis made reference to how women be yappin’ all the time, a super-original theme that the show seemed to take up as inspiration. The commercial parody for a dude-targeted anxiety cure called CouplaBeers (the prescription bottle is suspiciously tallboy-shaped) sees Gillis’ boorish husband finally able to stomach wife Gardner’s complaints about her mom needing to go into assisted living (women, amirite?) once he’s downed a few of his doctor-mandated medicines. The stuff also gives Gillis the ability to be a bullying, sexually harassing jerk at work and to turn his little league anger at his son (“C’mon Andrew, you can’t be bad at school and sports!”) into a drunkenly abusive tirade at the umpires.

Not a bad addition to the SNL canon of ads about wallpapering over your shortcomings with numbing medicines (see: Excedrin for Racial Tension Headaches, Xanax for Gay Summer Weddings, another about prozac for parents of clearly gay kids whose name escapes me). Here again, I’ll own up to my inability to divorce Gillis’ presence from my reaction, though. In those other fake ads, the joke was more about teasing the discomfort of the drug takers,. Here, the sketch plays more like everybody else needing to loosen up, even if Gillis’ character does have to resort to the sister product Li’l Bump (it’s cocaine) to counteract his other prescription. Gillis’ character isn’t presented as particularly laudable (his family eventually throws him an intervention), but the piece leaves the sour taste of pandering to the host’s “guys bein’ guys” persona.

Same goes for the wedding sketch, even if the initial pairing of bride and groom Sarah Sherman and Devon Walker looked poised to pick up on Gillis’ would-be edgy “have you ever slept with a Black guy?” monologue runner. No, instead we get a callback to the monologue’s dudebro misogyny, here seeing Gillis’ ex-boyfriend interrupting the nuptials not on racial ground but because Sherman once gave him a “free hand job” coupon that he now intends to redeem.

With first Walker, then Kenan Thompson’s priest and Mikey Day’s dad revealing in turn their own handmade and unfulfilled coupons (the priest and father’s being non-sexual, thankfully), the sketch becomes about Sherman being a flighty woman with a penchant for cheap, never-to-be-fulfilled promises, the spectacle of Gillis’ loser ex ruining her big day instead turning into a guffawing round of kick the bride. You pick out the snatches of inspiration where you can—Kenan is Kenan, his minister’s asides getting a few old pro chuckles. And the recurring joke that the coupons keep promising lots of eye contact during the act is specific and weird enough to land. But as was the case all night, Gillis’ presence poisoned the mood. Catering to the host is a time honored and necessary tack for SNL, one that can inject a unique energy to an entire episode. Here, the injection curdles sketch after sketch with traces of Gillis’ deeply unoriginal dude vibe until the cumulative effect killed off audience goodwill.

The PBS kids show hosted by Gillis’ divorced dad similarly shriveled with Gillis at the center. Kudos to props for making Gillis’ grimy bachelor apartment make your skin crawl, as he and his divorce-visiting children (Mikey Day and Sherman) play at the kids’ show motions while Gillis reacts to every beat with believably embittered divorced guy nastiness. At one point whipping up a breakfast of canned sausages in syrup, Gillis halfheartedly pantomimes shooting the leftover meat juice, and it was a toss-up whether his horrified kids or I were more ready to bail. Railing against alimony bills from Mr. Mailman, shooing his last-night bedmate (a puppet) out the door when she tries to introduce herself (“You liked what I did last night.” “Yeah, but I don’t want someone who does that around my kids.”), and berating his ex (Ashley Padilla) and her patiently decent new guy (James Austin Johnson, stealing it) over the phone, Gillis plays the sort of loathsome lump anybody would be well rid of, even as the gusto with which he delivers his abuse is meant to get all the laughs. It’s a matter of tone, and if Gillis’ offscreen history colors the laughs, that’s not on the viewer but on SNL/Michaels stubbornly platforming him. Without Gillis at its center, the sketch would be sour. With him, it’s unpalatable.

Please Don’t Destroy got back in the game with their parody of The Voice. I’m less enthused when the guys take their act out of their cramped backstage office to play people other than themselves, but this wasn’t bad, as the judges’ initial rapturous response to the unseen voice of Gillis’ singer turns to horror when they swivel their elaborate chairs to find him, well, Shane Gillis. Sporting a shock of limp, greasy hair and riding a mobility scooter, Gillis’ singer further appalls the judges by referring to himself as a 56-year-old otaku who hits on underage girls online, revealing that he doesn’t need the scooter, and basically being a creep as he unsuccessfully tries to get them to reverse course. There’s a genuinely funny bit where Ego Nwodim’s judge reveals that her chair has mobility of its own as she finally just takes off out of the studio, and there’s perhaps a smidge of awareness in presenting Gillis as such an offputting figure. “You can’t bail on me because of my looks or my vibe,” Gillis’ singer taunts, the jokey acknowledgement of Gillis’ whole deal being slightly undermined when the sketch sees the singer going on to duet with musical guest Tate McRae.

Weekend Update Update

Sometimes all you can do is laugh. Or, if your’s Colin Jost and Michael Che, snipe around the edges of the big, potentially fruitful stories and move on. Jost basically got the whole White House disgrace out of the way with a deadpan, “Pretty good” after asking how the meeting with Zelenskyy went and then playing a clip of Trump scolding a world leader for defending his invaded homeland. Che referenced Trump retweeting an A.I. video of the tacky, post-genocide Trump resort he wants to turn Gaza into as “an ISIS recruitment video,” while Jost mocked Musk’s renewed demand that federal workers list their five daily accomplishments by noting how the impregnation fetishist’s own would simply read “Got a lady pregnant” five times.

Jost and Che’s Update doesn’t have many surprises left in it at this point. “Could do more, amusing for what was there, Grade: B” is my usual assessment, although mark it down a half-grade tonight for Che dipping back into his “women’s sports, amirite?” well once again.

Nobody’s going to riff on the formerly obscure philosophical hypothetical the trolley problem better than The Good Place, but here’s to Jane Wickline for trying with another of her Update songs. Here, a love song purportedly geared to helping fellow Gen Z-ers find a partner turns into another of Wickline’s digressively eccentric rounds of musical conceptual comedy, as she turns the cliché of unconditional love into an insoluble choice between letting the loved one get squished or dooming multiple others. I like Wickline, even if it’s clear the show has no earthly idea what to do with her. These Update pieces are an amusing outlet that also indicate that apart from this one niche, SNL and Jane Wickline aren’t a great match. Watching a singular performer spin an absurd premise out into worlds only they could imagine is something I always enjoy. (“Oh no, my precautions created the very curiosity that led you to getting your foot stuck,” Wickline sings in horror after one speculative verse.)

Marcello Hernandez swipes the “Oscar picks but I haven’t seen any of the movies” schtick from Bill Murray for his bit as the doorman-costumed Movie Guy. (Hey, why not steal from the best?) Marcello does spin it, as his garrulous, heavily accented enthusiast is really only into Spongebob (puzzling Jost with a pronunciation I’m not even going to try to replicate), but, as with a lot of his star turns, Hernandez’s energy and endearing presence are more central to enjoyment than the actual jokes. He’s a fun watch, but there’s not a whole lot there. As Jost notes at one point, “I guess Im starting to wonder why you’re here.”

Political Comedy Report

The cold open had a day to prepare something about the appalling, disastrous, nation-shaming White House meeting in which Donald Trump and henchman J.D. Vance openly took a fascist dictator’s side over the visiting president of the U.S. ally nation Vladimir Putin invaded three years ago. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy (played in the inevitable opener by Mikey Day) withstood the red-faced bullying with accurately admirable stoicism befitting a guy literally holding off an authoritarian superpower with drones and guts, but it was as shameful a capitulation to authoritarianism as ever perpetrated by an American administration, all on international TV. (Including propagandists from Russian state TV, which Trump himself chose for access over Reuters and AP, for some reason.) Just putting it out there that anybody ever accusing me of being hysterical about the whole Trump-Russia thing can jump up their own ass.

As inevitable as it was that this sh*tshow would start off tonight’s episode, the resulting sketch was woefully and predictable caricature-based and feeble. Airing live as it does, SNL always has the upper hand on grabbing something as arrestingly topical as this debacle and jolting it with wit, imagination, and comic anger. Instead, we got James Austin Johnson’s admirably on-point Trump doing his usual digression schtick, taking off from Trump’s bullying “You don’t have the cards” insult to Zelenskyy for a run about Putin and Magic the Gathering, etc. Bowen Yang brought out his J.D. Vance as a bitchy stereotype (JAJ’s Trump congratulates him on making the cut for Real Housewives of Potomac), and then it was time for the big alumni drop-by, as none other than Mike Myers made his debut as Elon Musk.

Musk wasn’t at the meeting in question, but SNL never lets verisimilitude get in the way of a big name laugh, and Myers’ Musk is actually a pretty potent bit of mockery, as far as these things go. The appearance does pick up on the hypocrisy of right-wing sycophants claiming offense that the Ukrainian president disrespects the White House by foregoing suits for a solidarity-signaling dressed-down look in deference to his country’s defenders, since Musk presided over a recent cabinet meeting in a slogan t-shirt and baseball cap, and Myers came loaded for big game. The props were all there—Musk’s chainsaw and awkward little leaps, Andrew Dismukes as Musk’s own barely legal DOGE henchman Edward Coristine (aka Big Balls—now in charge of your Social Security!)—but Myers reminded us of his place in the SNL all-star lineup by imbuing his caricature with an energy sorely lacking from most of these pieces.

“What are you doing in my office?,” Myers’ Musk boomed before claiming, “I’m kidding! Maybe not,” his waxy human mask uncomfortably shifting a beat too late to approximate actual human humor. “Legalize comedy!,” has been the deeply unfunny Musk’s refrain as he lays claim to title of liberator of all those (looking at tonight’s host) claiming that dudes just can’t goof around about women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people being disgusting without everybody getting all in a twist about it. Musk himself likes to play the “I’m not a Nazi, I’m just awkward” card, and Myers depicting Musk glitching out mid-rant might echo that if not for him them going on to depict Musk as the twitchy, ketamine-addled hack-and-slash monster behind this administration’s plot to reinstitute some good old Apartheid-style segregation under the guise of rooting out that insidious DEI.

In the end, the guest spot overshadows the nominal purpose of the sketch. (You know, the whole acting like sneering 80’s teen movie bullies while trying to extort the mineral rights from a besieged ally on behalf of the bloodthirsty dictator Donald Trump is clearly beholden to.) Which is fine, I guess. I’ve come to expect so little from these cold opens (despite the admirable JAJ’s efforts) that Myers stealing the spotlight didn’t chafe as much as other celebrity cameos. (It helps that Myers’ Musk is a pretty potently fleshed-out characterization.) I have no idea of the heretofore cameo-averse Myers is up for a return as Musk, but his portrayal is an energetically wounding enough that I find myself hoping so.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Sarah Sherman has become the unlikely go-to for SNL this season. I like Sherman just fine, even if I wish the show hadn’t succeeded in sanding down so much of Sarah Squirm on its way to making Sherman so ubiquitous. Sherman plays to the cheap seats, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but her presence in a sketch generally signals that nuance isn’t on the menu.

Heidi Gardner had a big showpiece, even if I didn’t like it all that much as a whole. (I appreciated her puppet work better.)

Kenan continues to swoop in, swipe a scene, and dip, as befits his role as scene-stealer emeritus.

Devon Walker had a few meaty small parts, while Marcello Hernandez continues to score juicy spotlight turns. Jane Wickline got another song, which appears to be all the show has for her at this point. Meanwhile, Emil Wakim, Ashley Padilla, and James Austin Johnson continue to show their acting chops, even in small roles.

10-to-Oneland Report

As far as self-fellatio jokes go, I salute you, Emil Wakim, for making this one your own.

Stray Observations

Nobody in Saturday Night Live history has ever been singing live less than Tate McRae. And while I don’t begrudge a guide track, McRae’s breathless choreography had more than a little Jenna Maroney in it.

As the singing competition’s lone country singer judge, Ben Marshall’s Cody Swiggums boasts a pitch-perfect moniker.

No Chloe Fineman this week, as the SNL 50th anniversary event turns out to have been a celebrity super-spreader. Covid isn’t gone, people. Get your vaccines before RFK Jr replaces them with unpasteurized whale blubber.

Tonight’s RIP title card, sadly, went to New York Dolls icon David Johansen, who boasts a particularly impressive SNL feat on his career resumé as well as having been Bill Murray’s memorable Ghost of Christmas Past.

Again, hearing Shane Gillis’ news anchor accuse his Black co-hosts of being “the chicken people” hits sort of differently than it would coming from someone not him.

I appreciated Che biting the network’s feeding had about MSNBC firing Joy Reid and the exit of NBC anchor Lester Holt, part of a slashing spree of outspoken Black talent, coincidentally coinciding with Trump’s ascension. “Only one more to go, baby!,” also hits harder knowing that Che’s been making noises about exiting himself.

It was lousy that Bowen Yang had to deal with all the Gillis controversy when he got hired back in 2019. And now he’s had to cope with some SNL hanger-on’s baseless claims that he—an unknown who’d never yet appeared on the show—had been instrumental in getting Gillis fired. Collateral damage from Lorne Michaels’ leadership continues to fall on someone a whole lot more talented than Gillis.

Myers proudly sported a goodnights t-shirt emblazoned with “Canada is not for sale,” another reason it was nice to have the Canadian legend back in the studio.

Episode Grade: C-Minus.

Next week: Lady Gaga pulls double duty.