Shane Gillis’ “Saturday Night Live” Opening Monologue [Video]

The stand-up comedian Shane Gillis— famously hired and fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 when racist slurs he used on a podcast resurfaced — guest hosted the show, proving that longtime producer Lorne Michaels is still willing to court controversy if it means people will tune in to see potential fireworks.

But the fireworks were pretty muted and relegated only to the monologue that Gillis delivered, in which he acknowledged the firing sheepishly, but then proceeded to walk a comedic tightrope in the rest of his talk by using the term “retarded” and insisting that little boys who are close to their mothers are, at least temporarily, gay. Based on the hyperbolic reactions on social media, the monologue was either the worst in the show’s history or the best anti-woke comedy ever seen on the program.

The truth probably lay somewhere in the middle, with a clearly nervous Gillis leveraging his comedy skills to portray himself as a Nate Bargatze-like white-male comic with loving parents and a more diverse than you’d expect family. But it’s tough to say if the monologue drew more fans or just served to make Gillis even more polarizing than before the show, when more offensive comments from his past were reported.

How did Gillis fare otherwise? He didn’t show much sketch-comedy range that stretched him beyond his stand-up persona, but the guest host got laughs as a religious dad from a white family that visits a Jamaican church while traveling; as a guy in an HR meeting asking the rules for dating co-workers; and as a contestant on the game show “The Floor” who is afraid to get any answers wrong about African Americans. He also appeared as an enthusiastic owner of Fugliana, a not-too-attractive sex doll for below-average men; a rival of Forrest Gump (Mikey Day) at a 20-year high school reunion; and a man whose spying digital device displays online ads for a Green Bay Packers-themed sex toy.

Musical guest 21 Savage performed “Redrum” with backup singers singing Portuguese, and “Should’ve Wore a Bonnet” featuring Brent Faiyaz and Summer Walker. 

The much-anticipated/much-dreaded monologue from Gillis began humbly. “Yeah, I’m here,” Gillis said. “I was fired from the show a while ago. Don’t look that up, please. Don’t Google that.” But rather than going into detail or explaining why he was fired, Gillis shifted into a bit about his resemblance to a high school coach, “slash ninth-grade sex education teacher.” Next followed a routine about how every little boy close to his mother “is just your mom’s gay best friend.” It was a roundabout way of talking about the bond that breaks between moms and young boys once puberty hits, and the routine didn’t lack for bluntness with this joke: “Mom asked when did we stop being best friends. It was the first time I whacked off.” His warm feelings for mom shifted to, “When’s that b— gonna leave the house?”

But the diciest bit may have been an extended riff about Down syndrome, beginning with Gillis saying that he is sometimes mistaken for having it based on his appearance. “I dodged it, but it nicked me,” he joked. He revealed that he has family members, including a niece, with Down syndrome. “I thought that would get a bigger laugh,” he deadpanned. If anything, Gillis seemed self-aware about how his comedy might be perceived while also being unwilling to forgo the spotlight that the show would give him. “I don’t have any material that can be on TV,” he said, while delivering material that, at least under the watch of producer Lorne Michaels, did make it onto TV.