Shane Gillis came back to host Saturday Night Live for the third time since his 2019 firing, and the monologue that opened the show mostly fell flat. Wearing a matching black T-shirt and pants, he joked about needing to lose weight, hating hikes and trying to survive a public gym in New York.
That was the point of the bit, but the room did not seem to buy it. Gillis said going to the gym as a fat guy was a nightmare, complained that women dress like whores now and added that he had balded into an Adolf Hitler haircut, before wrapping with the line, “You’re either gay or you’re Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?” The response was groans and few laughs, the kind of silence that tells you the punch lines were landing nowhere near where he wanted.
The latest appearance matters because Gillis is no stranger to the show’s contradictions. He was announced in September 2019 as one of Saturday Night Live's newest cast members alongside Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang, then fired five days later after old podcast clips resurfaced showing him mocking Asians and using anti-gay slurs. Bowen Yang had just made history as the first Saturday Night Live cast member of full Asian descent and the third openly-gay male cast member ever, which made the backlash around Gillis impossible to separate from the cast he had briefly been set to join.
That history has never really been put to bed. Lorne Michaels later said the decision to remove Gillis was “very strong from the people in charge” and added that he understood it, even though he was not on that side. Yet Michaels also later offered Gillis the role of Donald Trump for Saturday Night Live's 50th season and allowed him to host three times, a sharp turn for a comedian who once lost the job before ever making it to air.
Gillis has since built a steadier profile elsewhere, creating and starring in Tires and landing a role in the upcoming biopic Madden. He has also already bombed a monologue during his first hosting stint in 2024, then blamed the Gen Z crowd for not getting his Civil War jokes, while later sketch work such as CouplaBeers drew a better response. Last night’s return did not change the central question around him: Saturday Night Live keeps bringing him back, but his live monologues still have to prove they can land without the history doing the heavy lifting.
