Being a stand-up comedy fan since childhood has often been an exercise in disassociation.
Watching specials by Louis C.K. and Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais on my mom’s work computer late at night, I learned to put space between myself and “other women”—that is, the women those comics took aim at. “Other” women were silly, flighty, embarrassing, annoying (such as those referenced in Burr’s 2017 riff about how there’s “plenty of reasons to hit a woman…you just don’t do it”). When I grew up, I vowed, I would be a Gone Girl-style Cool Girl, one who made the jokes instead of suffering them.
As I got older, however, I discovered new comedian lodestars. I delighted in John Mulaney and Nick Kroll embodying Upper West Side alter kaker in Oh, Hello, and Conner O’Malley doing bizarre performance art as the fake tech entrepreneur Richard Eagleton. Not all of their material was inherently feminist or affirming, but at least I could watch it without being distracted by basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor.”
Sadly, those who tuned in to Saturday Night Live over the weekend got just that. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” host Shane Gillis said during his opening monologue. “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.” (In a video later posted to Instagram, Dan Levy spoke for many viewers when he remarked: “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”)
Watching Gillis perform, I couldn’t help but think of myself as a tween, glued to the TV every Saturday night at 11:30 p.m., trusting what is perhaps America’s largest and most mainstream vehicle for comedy to tell me what was funny. What are young female comedy fans today learning from Gillis’s set, other than that their bodies constitute some kind of terrible inconvenience to the creepy men who want to ogle them? (Also: You’re “not allowed to look”? Really? Because it sounds like you’ve been looking a lot, Shane!)
There’s never a great time for lazy, misogynist humor, but the details of Cornell’s 2024 sexual assault case being litigated in public adds a particular sting to Gillis’s words. The thought of having to muster a laugh at some half-baked reinvention of the “wanton woman” stereotype when, online, so many survivors of sexual assault are sharing their stories of being dehumanized and debased by men just feels like a bridge too far right now.
In 2026, I’m done making excuses for dead-eyed male comedians who hate women more than they like writing good jokes. It’s not because I’m “offended” or “triggered” or whatever other demeaning adjective Shane Gillis fans and their ilk see fit to hurl at women who don’t crack a smile about their own objectification. It’s because the jokes simply aren’t funny. They never were.