I’ve been thinking about something since Shane Gillis hosted SNL last week. This post, though, isn’t really about Shane Gillis.
Here is my opinion on Shane Gillis, to get it out of the way (feel free to skip this part, all you need is the first sentence):
I think he is a pretty good comedian. His stuff isn’t to my taste, because I find some of the stuff he says offensive, and that makes it hard to me to enjoy the jokes. But unlike a lot of the other comics branded as “anti woke”, he is telling jokes - solidly constructed, well written, competently performed jokes. More importantly, he is by all accounts a good guy to work with, encouraging of younger performers, someone well regarded in the scene he came up in, and to my knowledge, no one has has ever accused him of being a sex criminal. Unlike most of the comics he’s compared to, he also doesn’t direct his fans to harass people who don’t like him (we’ll discuss this later). There are enough actual rapists, abusers, exploiters, and just generally toxic people in comedy that I don’t get too worked up about what someone who isn’t those things says onstage, as long as they’re stopping short of advocating fascism or war crimes or something. I don’t have a problem with Shane hosting SNL, and I thought it was pretty cowardly for SNL to fire him in 2019 - after all, they had initially hired him for the exact same reasons they ended up firing him (he says edgy shit that some people (myself occasionally included) feel crosses the line from playful ignorance to bigotry).
OK, now that that is out of the way, HERE is what I wanted to talk about.
What I can’t stop thinking about is not that Gillis was chosen to host, or anything he said or did while hosting. It was the responses I saw online1 from comedy fans (and in some cases even comedians) reacting to his performance. These responses run the gamut, generally tracking along ideological lines and real or imagined social allegiances, but the thing that struck me was that very few of them seemed to care one way or another about the actual comedy.
It’s a common criticism of leftist “wokescolds” that they’re so concerned with bad words or offensive ideas expressed through art that they can’t see the forest for the trees. And sure enough, most of the people who tweeted negatively about Gillis were tweeting to announce they hadn’t even watched the show because of his presence - a perfectly reasonable decision, but a weird one to announce. People on the other side of the argument, though, are just as guilty of their comedy brain turning off as soon as they hear something edgy. The most common response I saw from fans of Gillis online was elation that he’d said “gay” and “retarded” in his monologue, along with triumphant gloating as if Gillis’ SNL invitation was a collective victory for all people who say “gay” and “retarded” over people who don’t like it that they do. Whether anything he said succeeded as a joke or not seemed entirely beside the point, for everyone. Based on online reactions, I had no idea what his monologue was about at all, let alone whether or not anyone laughed at it. If the success or failure of Gillis’ performance was brought up, it was only to either praise or discredit performers seen to be on the other “side” of the culture war.
This phenomenon, where people experience jokes not as jokes but as part of a cultural proxy war, is exacerbated by the way the business of stand up comedy operates these days. The traditional ways of making a stand up career profitable have all but dried up - the pandemic dealt a critical blow to already flagging networks of suburban comedy clubs, and hell, JFL just went bankrupt yesterday. One of the only reliable ways left to make money in stand up is through developing parasocial connections with your social media followers. Deeper emotional investment leads to more money, and to evoke that depth of feeling, the comedian needs to stand in for something larger and more consequential than just “a guy who tells jokes”. They need to be a brand.
One of the easiest sorts of brands for a certain style of comedian to develop is that of the humble everyman fighting the elitist forces who want to silence him, all because he tells it like it is. Admirably, Gillis has never seemed to actively court this audience when he easily could have, but he certainly hasn’t turned them away, either2. A lot of his fans see him as just this sort of hero after what happened to him in 2019. This cultural positioning has been more conscious on the part of other “anti woke” comedians adjacent to Shane, and it’s worked out pretty well for them. Fans of this type of comic don’t seem to talk about comedy the way comedy fans typically have in the past. I never see them talking about material they like, or even material they don’t like. They have an allegiance to these people beyond just enjoying their comedy, to the point where the work itself becomes secondary. To them, this isn’t comedy, it’s sports, and they’re on the team, rooting for their comedian teammates to “win” against their enemies: other comics and fans who have voiced disapproval or even just lack of enjoyment.
This is why anyone online who suggested they didn’t like Gillis, or weren’t watching because of him, was met with a torrent of hateful, aggressive responses on social media. Someone even decided a woman in the SNL band must be a wokescold because she didn’t appear to be laughing at his monologue. An image of her went viral while people called her every name under the sun. Being this intense about a stranger not enjoying the same comedian as you seems like a relatively new phenomenon. Aren’t we all just here to have a giggle? when did everyone get so pissed off?
I don’t think any of the comics who encourage this anger would be half as mad about any of it if being mad about it didn’t make them a ton of money. For at least a few of the ones I know, the veneer of stick-it-to-the-woke-mob politicking in their work is relatively recent. For the ones who are actually funny, it barely makes its way into their actual acts at all, except for some perfunctory pandering to their newfound audiences. For their fans it might be like sports, but for the comics involved, it seems more like pro wrestling.
There is, to an extent, the same thing happening on the other side, with people who have branded themselves as “leftist comedians”. I am one3. I cut out a huge rambling paragraph here ruminating about it, but let’s just say I’m ambivalent about that descriptor, what it means about my work, and what it means about people who like it. Some of the ambivalence is because I know that as a comedian who has visibly positioned themselves politically, even if I don’t do so in my act, I have contributed to this cultural landscape where positioning matters more than anything else. As a wider phenomenon, though, this stuff is pretty minor on the left compared to the “anti woke” stuff, because it happens on a much smaller scale. While it similarly strengthens the parasocial bond with fans, expressing far left political beliefs isn’t very profitable, and doesn’t usually involve fan-on-fan harassment mobs in the same way.
Woke comedy fans aren’t off the hook either, though. If right leaning comedy fans act like they’re on a sports team with their faves, left leaning comedy fans sometimes act like they’re in a group therapy session with theirs. Just look at the way people infantilized Bowen Yang in the wake of Gillis’ appointment as a host. People angry with the choice lamented how terribly they felt for Yang, as a gay Asian American who was hired in the same cast as Shane back in 2019 (Gillis was fired after tape of him using racial slur against East Asian people on his podcast resurfaced, shortly after news of his casting broke). In fact, Yang and Gillis follow each other on instagram, and Yang had nothing to do with the decision to fire Gillis. They greeted each other amicably during SNL’s end credits (see the header image). And even besides all that, Bowen Yang is an adult in charge of his own very successful entertainment career! The idea that Shane Gillis would be the last straw for him when he already works on the TV show at which numerous underage girls were sexually assaulted, in full view of showrunners who still work there, seems a little silly to me. I don’t point out SNL’s history to condemn Yang for working there4, but to reiterate that he gets to make his own choices on how to navigate the ethical minefield that is working in entertainment; don’t assume he’d make the same ones you might. He’s not someone a comedy fan needs to feel protective over. I promise he’ll be fine, and I’m pretty sure he just wants you to laugh at his jokes rather than project your feelings onto him. Just go watch his Truman Capote impression from this episode, it was great!
Please don’t take from all this that I think jokes are “just jokes” or that there could ever be such a thing as apolitical comedy. Every form of organized human expression is political, and its reception shaped by politics. The part that’s sticking in my craw is this notion that the political content is the most important part of the work, and maybe even the entire point of it - that a joke is only incidentally a joke, it’s actually a chess move in the larger cultural game that the joke’s audience is playing. People who spend a lot of time online in particular seem to have difficulty getting away from this framework of analysis. I don’t think it’s very useful, and we sure are all laughing a lot less. Not every piece of art needs to be broken down and tabulated in the Woke/Based Ledger. We made all that up.
The craziest thing about all of this to me, all of this noise and reaction-to-reaction-to-reaction hubbub, is that Gillis didn’t bomb or crush on SNL. He did… fine. Ultimately, that’s how I feel about most of his work as a comedian. It’s all fine. Not for me personally, but from a craft perspective, it’s solid. We’ve triangulated ourselves into such restricted positions in a pitched battle for culture that the most polarizing phenomenon powering the zeitgeist is… a white guy in his 30s who does classic observational comedy and throws in a few no-no words that make people nostalgic for middle school. What a world.
please note - everything I say in this article is about the people who live in my phone. 95% of people who watched this SNL episode chuckled a few times and then went to bed and forgot all about it by Tuesday morning. But the 5% of people who are turbo-engaged in comedy and/or politics and/or The Zeitgeist are being REALLY weird.
I go back and forth on what I think an artist’s responsibility is for their fans. I think if my fans acted like his fans, I’d feel compelled to say something. He has, in a few cases - for example he asked people to call off their harassment of the SNL band member on a podcast after his appearance.
Although I feel like it was less a matter of conscious branding and more that I painted myself into a corner. Then again, maybe everybody thinks that.
Anybody who wanted to have a sustained career as a comedian would be an idiot to turn down an SNL job. I think that sucks, but I understand why people do it. Seth Simons wrote a great piece about how SNL became the last path to success in comedy through Lorne Michaels’ despotism. FWIW, the people I know who work there now are incredibly talented, and I don’t think any of them are sex criminals. And also, props to Bowen for the recent episode where he DID show what the last straw is for him: he appeared to refuse to stand near transphobe Dave Chappelle.