Even if you don’t know much country music, you likely know how much the genre loves the trope of the weepy father at his daughter’s wedding. In the best sketch of last night’s Saturday Night Live, the father of the bride was played by the host, Shane Gillis, but he wasn’t reflecting on life’s heavy milestones. Instead, he was thinking about “all the cool shit I can put in her room.”
As narrated by a Rascal Flatts–esque band (composed of Andrew Dismukes, James Austin Johnson, and Tommy Brennan), the dad imagined everything he was going to put in his new man cave: a Ms. Pac-Man machine and a pinball machine; a drum set that he swore he would finally learn to play; a life-size cutout of Shaquille O’Neal; a bottle of lotion and box of tissues (a bit stolen from the Paul Rudd film I Love You, Man); a House box set; a cotton-candy machine.
A child’s wedding is a joyous occasion, a new chapter for the family. But any beginning also reminds us that time’s arrow stubbornly points in only one direction. The sketch smartly underscored how many American men use consumer goods to distract themselves from anxieties about aging and the creeping sense that life may pass them by. Why deal with your uneasy feelings when you can finally afford the replica of a Star Wars stormtrooper you’ve wanted—nay, deserved—since you were a teenager? The hit of dopamine from a shopping spree is certainly more fun than wrestling with where your life currently stands.
The best SNL song sketches expand on a central idea as the parody progresses, commenting on the characters’ comedic dilemmas. They also need to nail the musical references (Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Zac Brown, and, yes, Rascal Flatts have all released songs on this theme, something that the southerners Dismukes and Johnson are likely aware of). In last night’s sketch, we learned that Gillis’s presumably long-suffering wife (Ashley Padilla) “hates my room / we’re drifting apart,” and that she’s becoming a bit too close with her Zumba instructor, Tad (Marcello Hernández), “who’s actually pretty cool”—an off-hand remark from a man too clueless to see what’s coming next. Whatever you think about him, last night’s host was well equipped for this exploration of male obliviousness.
[Read: What Shane Gillis proved on SNL]
In 2019, Gillis was set to join SNL before some of his old offensive jokes resurfaced and NBC rescinded the offer. Gillis apologized for the material, and SNL’s creator, Lorne Michaels, indicated that the casting decision was out of his hands. Michaels seems to have some lingering regrets about how it all went down; last night was Gillis’s third time hosting. But this overcorrection is arguably not doing Gillis many favors, as the episode often demonstrated his limitations as a comedian. He flubbed most of his lines—and cursed—in a sketch parodying Green Eggs and Ham, then apologized “about earlier” during the episode’s closing goodbyes.
Gillis tends to embody characters who aren’t actively hateful or toxic but just a little confused about society’s changing social mores and unsure about what they’re allowed to say. But Gillis, who lacks the dexterity of clear influences such as Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, can’t consistently pull off that tricky balance of thoughtfulness and provocation. During his opening monologue, in a bit about struggling to seem nonthreatening when he encounters a woman on an otherwise solitary hike, he lost the audience after saying, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” (I’ll spare you his description of women’s modern athleisure wear.) By that point, the crowd was so cold he couldn’t win it back with a clever closing riff about society’s polarization and the dangers of ambiguous haircuts: “You’re either gay or you’re Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?”
Still, Gillis has become a successful touring comedian, mostly because he is very good at expressing the immaturity, simmering hostility, and general dunderheadedness of a certain strain of American manhood. His best sketches from last night made use of that meathead persona, as when he played a jerky police officer hosting the discussion show Cop Talk and the manager of an HVAC company that prided itself on having the most off-putting employees you would ever encounter.
But the wedding-song sketch stood out because it zeroed in on the stunted emotional life of Gillis’s character and then mocked it relentlessly. After his wife left him for Tad, he decided to build an even bigger room of one’s own (“Super Room Rocks!”), but when the impromptu construction project exposed him to black mold, he began “tripping balls.” The story eventually took an unexpectedly frisky turn before the episode’s kicker revealed this entire misadventure was a dream sequence that began after he forgot to help his daughter and wife pack up the moving van—a sly commentary on the character’s misplaced priorities.
It’s hard to say whether Gillis found success because he’s secretly very perceptive about the state of modern masculinity or because he’s unafraid to admit just how unperceptive he is about the modern world. Either way, last night’s song fulfilled the country-music imperative of “three chords and the truth”: a catchy ballad about how many men are emotionally stunted and unable to deal with aging and change, and will instead retreat into materialism and adolescent interests rather than reconcile with life’s relentless momentum.