A Controversial Comedian Called Women “Whores” on SNL. What Truly Makes It Terrible Isn’t Just That It Was Offensive.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

I sincerely thought I was done having to think about Shane Gillis. I was on a good run. It’s been about seven years since the comedian was slated to become a new cast member for Saturday Night Live, until a clip of his podcast surfaced wherein Gillis used an anti-Asian slur and made some fairly unfunny jokes about Chinatown and Chinese cooking. He gave the air of apologizing without doing so, was subsequently fired from SNL before the start of the season, and then went on to have a career that flourished so intently—multiple popular specials, a Netflix comedy that was recently renewed for its fourth season—that SNL invited him back as a host not once, but three times.

His latest turn in the host’s chair happened this past weekend, and boy, oh boy did his opening monologue ruffle feathers. Though almost the entirety of his seven-minute introduction was characteristically caustic, it was Gillis’ so-called jokes about women that have sparked outrage among viewers and beyond. Specifically, Gillis’ comments about women at the gym became the main source of vexation:

I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dressed like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]. Have you seen it? … The shorts? Have you seen the shorts? There’s neon—they’re like artificial bait colors. The wrinkles go, like, around the cheeks, and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look—you’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, cause they are filming. I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.

Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe this than tired and, even worse, lame. Calling women whores is not funny; what they’re wearing—no matter what it is—does not justify it, either. Nor is it original; I swear this joke has been made by teenage boys in lunchrooms across all of America for at least a solid decade, so I can’t say this is approaching a new frontier of humor. Further, not only is the joke itself not funny, but it’s barely even a joke—where’s the turn? It reads more like a bewildered observation from a guy time-traveling here from the 1800s than any example of comedy. Come on: If you’re going to degrade entire groups of people on national television, then is it too much to ask for you to do it well? When Dave Chappelle was slinging transphobic jokes around on his Netflix specials, they at least came with a punch line.

Unsurprisingly, Gillis’ joke (or whatever you want to call it) upset a number of people. Female comedians spoke out, including Phoebe Robinson, who took to her Instagram to ask: “Aren’t we sick of this misogynistic, lazy ass, hack, mediocre, straight, male fucking disdain for women that’s ‘masked’ as comedy?” Comedian Hannah Jones facetiously claimed that Gillis stole her joke, before showing a clip of her satirically mocking what men wear to the gym. On social media, Gillis is being torn apart and, of course, defended by the anti-woke comedy defense brigade of bros on X who see crass comedians as one of today’s most oppressed groups.

But the reality of the matter—and why it caught and spread online like a wildfire over the holiday weekend—is that Gillis’ monologue hit at a particularly charged time. One of the biggest news stories that has seemingly enraptured the entire nation, if not the world, in recent months has been the ongoing lawsuit regarding a 2024 alleged gang rape at Cornell. Since that news broke in September, the topic of rape culture—what it is, how it persists, and how we can quash it—has been one of the most impassioned topics of debate both in person and online. Right now, understandably, everyone is a little on edge when it comes to gender-based comments, remarks, and unfunny jokes launched on major late-night television programs.

Writer and actor Dan Levy made an Instagram video absolutely lambasting Gillis’ comments, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores, it makes the men calling them whores misogynists.” Levy continues by tying Gillis’ remarks to rape culture, stating: “It’s complacency that has created the environment with which women are sexually assaulted,” because “the more that men objectify women in the media, the more that other men see them as objects and treat them as objects.”

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti doesn’t mince words while making the connection herself, claiming in an Instagram video that Gillis is “very well aware” of the current national conversation about sexual assault. “This is him telling us what he thinks of the discourse on sexual assault. And we would do very well to listen to him and take that seriously because, I’ve gotta tell you, this is what turns young men into rapists. And I have no issue being unequivocal about that.” She goes on to ask, “When you demean and denigrate and dehumanize women, and say that they’re not real human beings, they’re just ‘whores,’ they’re clothes are ‘bait,’ what do you think rape culture is?” Like Levy, Valenti also puts the blame on SNL, stating that the show “platformed rape culture in the middle of maybe the country’s biggest national reckoning on sexual assault and they should be fucking ashamed.”

The other minutes of Gillis’ monologue are just as acerbic and arguably just as questionable on the scale of “funny” and “how did this guy get this job?” He mentions his “friend” Joe Rogan, he does an impression of his pal Theo Von (a similarly politically fraught comedian), he talks about how he was raised by “two big fat bitch sisters” who engaged in “psychological” warfare against him in his youth, and he ends the monologue by ribbing on his own hairstyle, concluding with the rhetorical question: “You’re either gay or you’re Hitler. And isn’t that where we’re at as a country?”

In 2024, Slate’s Luke Winkie appropriately summed up Gillis’ whole shtick: His overall persona—“an amiable oaf from central Pennsylvania,” Luke called it—isn’t necessarily about being political, but just crass and uninterested in the hypothetical guardrails on speech that are imposed by a progressive, so-called woke agenda. Still, Luke aptly maintained that Gillis’ tack of remaining particularly politically mum only emboldens his more vociferous fans who do like comedy that laughs in the face of liberal “progression” and whose politics might reflect that.

Clearly, this still seems to be working for Gillis just fine. But he and his fans—including, I guess, Travis Kelce—shouldn’t be so shocked that they’re facing pushback at this juncture. If asking for women to stop being dehumanized and oversexualized is apparently too much for their little snowflake hearts, then is it still too much to ask comedians to be funny?