dpShane Gillis returned to host “Saturday Night Live” for the third time since his 2019 firing, emerging in a matching black T-shirt and pants for a meandering monologue about needing to lose weight and being miserable (and trying to be unthreatening to women) while hiking.
“I tried to go to a public gym. Going to the public gym as a fat guy, especially in New York, is a nightmare, dude,” he opined. “It’s just the hottest gay guys you’ve ever seen. They’re jacked and they look at me, like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ‘I know, dude.’”
“Also, I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” he cracked to groans from the in-studio audience. “Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. You’ve seen the shorts? They’re those neon, like, artificial bait-colored [shorts], and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming. I’m in the background of ten TikToks right now [grinning].”
There was more, of course. Gillis riffed on his “two big, fat-bitch sisters” who would heckle him by saying “the meanest things,” like calling him “bitch hips,” and poked fun at how his receding hairline is starting to make him resemble a certain fascist leader.
“I’ll tell you the thing that I’m really bothered by is: I’ve balded directly into an Adolf Hitler haircut,” he joked. “And it’s not good. Because I give a lot of speeches and the front falls down a lot, and there’s no way to adjust it without looking exactly like [Hitler]. It’s the only way. I’m not going to [brush it to the side], that’s gay. That’s it: You’re either gay or you’re Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?” There were few laughs, and then it abruptly ended. Gillis has shown considerable comedy chops in his stand-up specials and hosting the ESPYs, but nailing an “SNL” monologue seems to be elusive for him.
Gillis, 38, has had a very rocky “SNL” journey.
Back in Sept. 2019, he was announced as one of the sketch-comedy show’s newest cast members, alongside Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang. He was fired five days later after clips resurfaced from Gillis’s podcast where he mocked Asians and used anti-gay slurs — which looked even worse given that Yang had just made history as the first “SNL” cast member of full Asian descent (and third openly-gay male cast member ever). Gillis subsequently made a name for himself sans “SNL” with a popular podcast, two stand-up specials, creating and starring in the Netflix series “Tires” and a role in the upcoming biopic “Madden.”
“SNL” creator Lorne Michaels would later admit that he was forced to give Gillis the boot against his wishes by NBC brass, telling The Wall Street Journal, “That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.” And since then, it seems that Michaels has been on a mission to make good with Gillis, offering him the role of Donald Trump for “SNL’s” 50th season (Gillis turned it down) as well as allowing him to host the show three times. While Gillis bombed his monologue during his first hosting stint in 2024, later blaming the Gen Z crowd for not getting his Civil War jokes, he’s since impressed with popular sketches like “CouplaBeers.”
