Shane Gillis’s misogynistic ‘SNL’ monologue is now Lorne Michaels’s legacy

I don’t normally double-dip when it comes to writing up my thoughts on an episode of SNL, but the more I’ve thought about it, the angrier Shane Gillis’s monologue has made me.

I haven’t been to the gym in so long. I didn’t know women just dress like whores now. Look, 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? They’re like artificial-bait colored. And the wrinkles, the wrinkles go, like, around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look! 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.

I’m a 40-year-old dude, and this bit horrified me when I heard it live. I can’t even imagine how it would feel to be a young girl who has just discovered SNL, and you turn on Gillis’s episode to hear “women just dress like whores now” being presented as comedy.

There should be no home for his brand of comedy that revels in degrading women on SNL.

Thanks to Gillis saying “fucking” during a live sketch, his monologue seemed to have snuck under the radar on Sunday. A lot of outlets, The Cold Open included, focused on the host dropping an f-bomb.

But Gillis swearing on live TV is just a symptom of him lacking the skills and discipline to not let that slip during a sketch. His monologue, though, was not a mistake.

Multiple people posted online that Gillis had tested out the material in his SNL monologue during comedy club sets. “I saw Shane Gillis perform a few weeks ago (surprise set, I didn’t know going in) and he did what turned out to be exactly his SNL monologue,” wrote The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner. “He started out rocky, but this joke lost him the room. Near-total silence. It was bruuuutal.”

As outrage over the monologue boiled over on Monday, there’s a good chance the blowback appeared on your social media feed thanks to Dan Levy. “I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television,” the Schitt’s Creek creator said in an Instagram reel. “And to be perfectly honest, 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.’”

The obvious outcome here is that Gillis never hosts SNL again and Michaels, SNL and NBC apologize for platforming Gillis’s misogyny. My fear, though, is that the outrage over this monologue is going to make Michaels dig in deeper.

In a normal world, there’s no way that Gillis ever hosts SNL to begin with, much less does he host the show three times over four seasons. But Michaels has a score to settle. Public opinion forced him to fire Gillis in 2019, and Michaels hasn’t forgotten that.

“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels told The Wall Street Journal in 2024. “I was angry. I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing.”

Lorne Michaels speaks for SNL. And until Michaels speaks up, Shane Gillis now speaks for him.

The Cold Open is a publication of The Omnicosm.
Issue No. 92

The Cold Open is written and produced by Bill Kuchman.
Copyediting by Tim Kuchman.

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