The Left’s Performative Misunderstanding

D an Levy is disappointed in you, America.

The Canadian comedian and self-appointed humor policeman has expressed his disgust with Shane Gillis’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue, in which Gillis joked that some women now “just dress like whores” at the gym.

“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores,” Levy said on Instagram. “It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”

After saying he was “speechless” that such a thing could be broadcast on national television, Levy bravely overcame his speechlessness to complain that “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.’”

You have heard of Levy, whose comedy is so nuanced that he gave his hit show the cryptic name Schitt’s Creek, only because he is the son of comedy royalty — effectively the Don Jr. of Canada. His father, Eugene Levy, was a founding member of SCTV, a show that trafficked in unfortunate racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes in much the same way that SNL has over the years. Eugene Levy is perhaps best known to American audiences for his role in a movie where a teenage boy copulates with a hot apple pie.

Nonetheless, despite his comedic DNA, Levy appears to have joined the hordes of people who don’t know what a “joke,” a “comedian,” or a “sketch comedy show” is. SNL has been the home of offensive comedy for 52 years. In October 2020, comedian Bill Burr gave a monologue in which he mocked white women for making the “woke” movement about them, referring to them as “b*tches.” Levy was so outraged, he accepted an invitation to host nine episodes later. All principles are negotiable when your career could use a boost.

But the performative whiners on the left simply can’t leave Gillis alone. After being named as a cast member and “canceled” before his first episode for making crude jokes about gays and Asians on a podcast before his SNL hiring, Gillis became one of America’s biggest comedians and has hosted the show three times. Every time, his appearances have been followed by theatrical bellyaching from progressives, angry that their inner sanctum has been breached by someone unwilling to adhere to their cultural dictums. (Gillis is no conservative; a month ago he mused about the need for “free” health care.)

So what was Gillis’s crime? First, a bit of semantics: Gillis never called any women “whores,” as Levy alleges. He joked that women at the gym dress like whores, which is a different accusation. If I walked down the street wearing a Milwaukee Brewers baseball uniform, people would say I was dressed like a Milwaukee Brewer, but nobody would think I played Major League baseball.

Second, it may surprise some people that, to make a joke, comedians occasionally say things they don’t believe or that aren’t true. In Burr’s 2020 monologue, delivered during the Covid-19 pandemic, he joked that people shouldn’t wear masks because the world has too many people and you should be able to take out your grandma and grandpa if you want. He also made light of former SCTV cast member Rick Moranis being cold-cocked in the streets of New York, using that assault to cheerfully declare that New York City was back.

Did Burr really want you to kill your relatives? Was he happy Moranis got decked? Those who know what stand-up comedy is — namely, everyone who hadn’t accidentally ingested Tide Pods — understood that this was simply Burr’s sardonic style. The best laughs come when you laugh at something you know you’re not supposed to, and comedians like Burr, Louis C.K., and Gillis are technicians at this style: setting a controversial rhetorical trap and letting you watch them escape it.

Similarly, Gillis’s critique of modern gym fashion wasn’t to get a laugh at his bravery for using the word “whore.” In fact, the first half of his bit sets up a joke where he is the punchline, musing that he is now in the background of a bunch of TikTok videos leering at women in tiny shorts. Ultimately, he is the creep in the story he’s telling.

All of this matters because, ultimately, none of it matters. In the attention economy, consequential events fly by unnoticed while internet barkers take faux umbrage at the most inoffensive remarks. Social media exists for people to performatively and proudly misunderstand things to create a synthetic reality where only they have the moral high ground. If it isn’t Shane Gillis, it’s a new Sydney Sweeney ad or Sophie Cunningham expressing an opinion on biological males in women’s sports. It’s all just grist for the content mill.

And, of course, Gillis’s critics don’t much care for the cause of women’s rights. The Venn diagram of people yapping at Gillis yet savaging Susan Dell’s looks after she pledged over $6.2 billion to help kids start savings accounts is a single circle. Whether you’re allowed to age in public depends on your associations with the White House.

Yet progressives refuse to learn any lessons from their phony hysterics. They are blind to the ways their woke one-upmanship backfires. For one, Gillis’s monologue has prompted thousands of women across the country to post photos of themselves working out in very little clothing. The men come out way ahead on that transaction.

Further, any time they overreact to Gillis, it simply exposes their absurdity and makes him stronger. Gillis’s career exists because they don’t want it to — every complaint brings him more viewers and broadens his appeal.

Is there nobody on the left who can explain these things to their own kind? Are there any old-school Democrats who can note, for instance, that SNL, a show with a profoundly liberal sensibility, used to regularly mock different races, poke fun at gays and disabled people, and feature monologues where malodorous women were told to “wash their ass” properly? And yet, while this all may be tasteless, society has survived and, in many ways, gotten much better.

More than 60 years ago, the historian Daniel Boorstin warned that America was filling up with “pseudo-events,” happenings staged for no purpose other than to be reported on. He also defined the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

Boorstin didn’t live to see Instagram, but he would have recognized Dan Levy on sight: a man famous mostly for his last name, manufacturing a scandal out of a joke in which the comedian was self-deprecating. None of this was ever about women, or gym shorts, or even Shane Gillis. It was about being seen being offended.

Society has survived controversial comedians before, and we will survive Shane Gillis, too, as long as we preserve the quaint notion that sometimes a joke is just a joke.