On ‘SNL,’ Shane Gillis flipped the script on the cultural scolds

“Shane Gillis’s SNL hosting gig is an unearned rehabilitation,” screamed a Vox headline the day before Gillis would take the vaunted stage at 30 Rock.

Gillis is the comedian hired by “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 before being abruptly fired after jokes deemed offensive toward Asians and gay people (and more) were reported in the media.

What’s he been up to since? Well, according to Aja Romano in Vox, he has continued making “racist, anti-trans, anti-gay, antisemitic, and arguably white supremacist statements” — quite the list! “In 2024, Gillis’s brand of racism is more palatable than ever,” the piece concludes.

This hyperbolic, absurd — but clarifying — cultural commentary has sadly been representative of the consensus opinion among the Extremely Online Elite when it comes to SNL’s “platforming” of Gillis. This chorus makes up just a tiny portion of America but a loud and obnoxious portion of the internet. And it provides a great prologue to the actual episode Gillis hosted on Saturday.

Because what Gillis’s performance as host proved is how frivolous and insipid this sort of punditry actually is. Gillis showed on Saturday why the long-running late night comedy show wanted to hire him in the first place. And any discerning, thoughtful viewer would clearly see that the smears won’t stick.

Gillis’s opening monologue used terminology that could have gotten him in trouble based on the new anti-speech activists in the media — he says “gay” and “retarded,” for example. But the “gay” joke is about how little boys grow up as their moms’ “gay best friend,” and his extended riff on members of his family who have Down syndrome concludes with a punchline about a bully calling his niece “retarded.” It’s a sweet anecdote. And if there was intellectual honesty and consistency among the woke progressives today, you would hear that Gillis was humanizing a marginalized group, drawing from his lived experience.

Gillis exposed the fraud of these cultural hall monitors by meticulously crafting his set to both lean into the controversy of his past and flip it on its head.

Then there was the sketch getting arguably the most attention, with Gillis playing a loser who discovers the new Donald Trump gold shoes and becomes cooler. Gillis has always had a fantastic Trump impression in his arsenal, but he’s been unfairly portrayed as a Trump supporter. And despite what some would like to believe, this sketch isn’t pro-Trump either. Beneath the surface is an obvious critique of Trump, because the shoes don’t actually change anything, other then that “winning is a state of mind.” His character lies about his prowess on the basketball court, and in bed. “Trump is a liar, but a convincing one,” is the message — and there is a little shot at President Biden at the end.

The sketch is funny because it’s not hitting the audience over the head with the point like the cold open was, which portrayed four GOP senators lamenting the state of their party as they cozy up to Trump. The Gillis Trump shoes sketch is a departure from the political comedy that SNL has become known for during the Trump years — it’s subtle, and smart.

(There was also the sketch where Gillis leans into the critics by playing a racist himself, and, unrelated to the central point, he had an absolutely hilarious online-only sketch about the Liberty Mutual LiMu Emu gone bad.)

In my book “Uncovered” (out in paperback this month), I document the way that countercultural figures have become the culture — how our late night hosts are largely delivering the most sanitized diatribes against Trump and the “bad person” du jour. In this vacuum of cultural sameness, we’ve seen the rise of counter-consensus figures in media and comedy like Joe Rogan or Glenn Greenwald.

The cultural gatekeepers who have felt their power eroding are lashing out, furious that their tactics no longer work. Which explains the reaction to Gillis stepping into the SNL spotlight, on a show they thought was part of their own bland cultural wavelength.

“SNL’s olive branch to Shane Gillis reflects a dangerous failure to learn from the hate movements that blossomed during the Trump era,” wrote Seth Simons in the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a lucrative market for views like his in the world of bigotry,” wrote Dean Obeidallah at CNN (notably published after the Saturday show).

These columns exemplify why it is in fact the condescending media scolds — who look down on more than half the country as narrow-minded and unsophisticated — who are themselves the provincial ones.

Because here’s where we’re at: There are articles being written about Bowen Yang, a gay Asian SNL cast member, daring to give Gillis a big hug on stage after the show. (The same Bowen Yang who reportedly “distance[d] himself” from Dave Chappelle, the genius comedian who has been smeared as “transphobic.”) It was one final letdown for the losers who wanted Gillis to fail — a cherry on top of the “platforming” rehab sundae.

There’s a dearth of critical thinking and nuance among our supposed cultural elites. But Shane Gillis on SNL proves that the unimpressive consensus-pushers are losing. The state of our culture, and the country as a whole, is better for it.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.