Media outlets get the easy joy and rush of tearing down the guy who might be the last popular comedian to exist.
The Trump-fluent stand-up comedian Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time last weekend. He’s become something of a comedy legend because, after being hired by SNL but before his first episode as a player, he was “canceled” for using various slurs or making ethnic jokes on podcasts. Through hard work on his stand-up set and some YouTube-based sketch comedy, he has become arguably the most popular and relevant stand-up comedian working today.
His monologue on the show on Saturday seemed to fall a little flat with the crowd. After making a joke about how fat he is, and how he’s gone back to the gym, he remarked on women’s exercise clothes. “So women just dress like whores now?”
That clip started to go viral, and women in revealing gym clothes sent him videos calling him a hater. Dan Levy, the star of Schitt’s Creek, made a statement implying that Gillis shouldn’t be on broadcast television.
Now it’s a self-sustaining media news cycle of nonstories.
One was about a post on X by Michael Che, the co-host of SNL‘s Weekend Update. Che is doing promotional interviews for his latest stand-up special and is getting asked about Gillis. He appeared to complain about this on X, “Thanks, Shane.” The New York Post said that Che was “calling him out.” But that’s not even true. Che is just joking about the controversy itself. In Gillis’s own telling about his SNL adventure, Che is a friend. They like and respect each other as stand-up comedians.
Another nonstory comes from the X account of Philadelphia magazine, a publication in Gillis’s home state, offering to tell us what rules Gillis broke in his SNL appearance.
Gillis is treated as a stand-in for MAGA itself, despite being harshly critical of the president in candid moments, because he’s liked by more populist conservative audiences, and by Joe Rogan and the anti-woke comedy scene.
But I think what’s really at work is that Gillis is just popular, and publications that have to chase audiences are parasitic on anything that looks like a shared reference point in a culture that the internet and social media have broken up into roughly 335 million silos. In this way, Gillis might be the last popular comedian to exist. Media outlets get the easy joy and rush of tearing down someone that has been built up.
I wonder how much longer any of this can last now that it is entirely sustained by clips shared from YouTube.