The comedian Shane Gillis’s rocky track record with “Saturday Night Live” continued over the weekend when he hosted the NBC sketch show for a third time.
During his seven-minute monologue, which consisted mainly of self-deprecating jokes about his appearance and weight, Gillis had a bit about going to the gym.
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” he said to a smattering of laughs and groans. “I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts. Have you seen the shorts?” he asked, comparing them to neon-colored fish lures. “And don’t look!” he continued. “You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming. I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.”
Gillis, 38, also joked about his friends Joe Rogan and Theo Von, podcasting stars of the manosphere who had ribbed him about his looks.
He went on to call his sisters “fat,” adding an epithet; to suggest he looks like a lesbian; and to say that he had “balded directly into an Adolf Hitler haircut,” adding that he didn’t sweep his hair behind his ears because “that’s gay.”
“That’s it, you’re either gay or you’re Hitler. And isn’t that where we’re at as a country?” he said to close out the set.
But it was his comments about women at the gym that drew a withering critique from the Emmy-winning actor Dan Levy (“Schitt’s Creek”), who posted a video on Instagram on Sunday night.
“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores, it makes the men calling them whores misogynists,” Levy, 43, said in the video, which has been liked more than 1.4 million times as of Monday afternoon and has nearly 30,000 comments.
“I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television,” Levy, who hosted “S.N.L.” in 2021, continued, then added, “More men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a ‘conversation’ as opposed to a ‘crime.’”
In a lengthy profanity-laced post about Gillis’s monologue, the comedian Phoebe Robinson asked, “Aren’t we tired? Aren’t we sick of this misogynistic, lazy ass, hack, mediocre, straight, male [expletive] disdain for women” that’s masked as comedy?
Through a representative, Gillis declined to comment on Monday.
In the comments of Levy’s post, Viola Davis, Elizabeth Banks, Jewel, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Hannah Einbinder and Flavor Flav were among the celebrities voicing support. “Nailed it,” Banks wrote.
Gillis’s monologue wasn’t his only messy moment in the episode: During a Dr. Seuss-themed sketch, he accidentally used an expletive. The word was aired during the live broadcast but edited out in online postings. During the curtain-call goodbyes, Gillis apologized to the crowd, saying, “Sorry about earlier.”
In 2019, Gillis was abruptly fired from “S.N.L.,” just after being named to the cast, when offensive remarks — including a slur referring to Chinese people, along with a caricatured accent, and a homophobic epithet — that he had made surfaced, but he returned in 2024 and 2025 as host.
After his firing, Gillis’s star quickly rose: His debut comedy special, released on YouTube in 2021, has been viewed 58 million times; his 2023 special, “Beautiful Dogs,” had a run on Netflix’s list of Top 10 most popular shows; he landed an endorsement deal with Bud Light; and his Netflix workplace comedy, “Tires,” was just renewed for a fourth season in August.
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