SNL Knew Exactly What They Were Getting With Shane Gillis as Host — And They Wanted it

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There are many astonishing things about Shane Gillis going out on the Saturday Night Live stage and observing that lately women in the gym are dressing like “whores.” Think about the journey that joke took: Someone told the joke in a writer’s bullpen, then brought it up at a meeting, then typed up for a script, then someone put it on cue cards, then Gillis read it in dress rehearsal. And at no point in that lengthy process (notoriously full of re-writes!) did someone with the power to stop the joke from going to air actually stop it.

No one worried about Shane Gillis getting cancelled, presumably because Shane Gillis has already been cancelled, indeed, was already cancelled by Saturday Night Live. They can’t help uncancelling him.

Gillis was hired to become a cast member in 2019 when a reporter surfaced numerous offensive excerpts from Gillis’ own podcast. Among many other things, he called Judd Apatow and Chris Gethard “white f*ggot comics” and “f*cking gayer than ISIS.” The offer to join the cast was rescinded.

Then in 2024, after Gillis’ career had taken off, the rescinding was rescinded and he became a guest host. In that 2024 monologue he boasted, “I don’t know if you can tell by looking at me, but I do have family members with Down Syndrome. It almost got me.”

They had him on again in 2025, when he prompted a minor dust-up over his observation about television shows that women find boring: “That’s a little Cosby tip for you, actually. Who needs roofies when we have ‘Ken Burns Presents: The History of the Buffalo’ on PBS.”

So this past weekend was his third time hosting and despite the outcry, I suspect it will not be his last.

Gillis stands out as one of the few hosts whose fans are perceptibly right-of-center. In 2024, Gillis reacted to the audience’s silence after a Biden joke with, “Look, I get it, you’re pretty liberal here.” Gillis took a picture with President Donald Trump at a UFC fight in 2023 and attended Trump’s “UFC Freedom Fest” (though declined to take a picture with him). He has also parodied the president and claimed to not vote for him in 2024. But conservatives certainly think of him as their own: Ben Shapiro has come to his aid just yesterday.

Much of SNL’s best comedy is destabilizing, it asks us to reconsider previously held beliefs. The jokes Gillis has been making depend on honoring the previously held beliefs of a certain slice of white America. Become a part of a culture that celebrates “traditional” gender roles and the ability to use the “r-word” with equal fervor and it’s not a question of if you make jokes at the expense of the marginalized, it’s when. You don’t question if it’s funny to give advice about raping people. Or if people with Down’s syndrome are funny-looking. Or if dressing in sexy clothes makes a woman a whore.

And as long as SNL keeps bringing him back, the cycle will spiral: Gillis appearance leads to offensive jokes, leads to outrage, leads to conservatives rallying, leads to Shane Gillis getting more popular, leads to the next SNL gig. To stop expressing outrage doesn’t break the cycle, either, it just normalizes the sensibility.

Perhaps SNL’s producers and writers – all those people who passed the “whore” line onto the next link in the chain– think they’ve just accepted the risk that Gillis will say something bigoted as the price they pay for having a conservative-leaning comic on the show. Gillis hosting SNL is protective cover at a time when the Trump administration is watching late-night television very closely for content they consider “political,” and having Gillis on has indeed gotten them a pop of attention beyond their traditional demographic. But the truth of the network’s situation is not merely that they’re taking a chance he’ll say something awful. He will. And whether they know it or not, that is exactly why they’re having him on.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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