With Shane Gillis hosting, ‘SNL’ saves the good stuff for Lady Gaga

A Saturday night without an episode of SNL would have been better than the episode that we got this weekend. With the buzz of SNL50 over and the allure of Lady Gaga next week, SNL phoned it in as Shane Gillis — arguably one of the worst hosts in SNL history — returned for the second time.

If Gillis is your thing, good for you. But the man cannot host an episode of SNL to save his life. There’s almost zero connection with the studio audience during his monologue. He plays variations of the same one-note character in each sketch. He’s not polished enough to gracefully read the cue cards.

I have a theory that Lorne Michaels keeps bringing Gillis back as an “F you” to all of us after believing he was forced to fire him almost immediately after announcing that the show had hired Gillis. I’m in the middle of reading Susan Morrison’s Lorne biography, and it’s almost unheard of for Michaels to be pushed into a corner — especially decades into producing SNL — like he was after Gillis’ hiring backfired in 2019.

The question I have now is whether Michaels has gotten this out of his system after letting Gillis host in back-to-back seasons — or is he planning on driving this point into the ground until Gillis is a quick member of the Five Timers Club?

COLD OPEN

Elon Musk Cold Open

I didn’t spend any time this week trying to guess what the cold open would be. It never occurred to me to try to spin the White House meeting between Donald Trump, JD Vance and Vladimir Zelenskyy into something fun.

SNL gave it a shot with this cold open.

And I can’t say that it worked. Is this a funny moment? It’s hard to laugh at Mike Myers as Elon Musk when the local news right before SNL highlighted an emergency jobs fair in the DC area for people who have lost their careers due to DOGE’s mass layoffs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this cold open was originally supposed to be about the White House Cabinet meeting that Musk was at last week. The title of the sketch is “Elon Musk Cold Open,” which feels like a giant clue. On top of that, SNL bringing Myers in to play Musk would make more sense if he would have had an entire sketch to perform this portrayal.

• Wayne and Garth and Elon: Welp, it turns out the Season 50 slew of guest stars didn’t end with SNL50. Instead of having a cast member play Musk, SNL brought in Myers. He follows Dana Carvey as the show’s Musk.
  • During goodnights, Myers — who, like Lorne Michaels is Canadian — opened his vest to reveal a shirt with the Canadian flag and the message that “Canada is not for sale.”
• “You didn’t say anything about us being handsome”: Was Bowen Yang’s take on Vance funny? I guess so. But it’s still bizarre to me that, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, “SNL all but passed on spoofing JD Vance despite his awkward trips to donut shops, cat lady comments and, um, the couch thing.”
• “Fully disassociating”: Marcello Hernandez becomes the third SNL cast member to portray Marco Rubio, following Taran Killam and Pete Davidson.

THE MONOLOGUE

“Holy shit this monologue is terrible,” Vulture’s Jen Chaney wrote on Bluesky as Gillis was attempting to do his standup opener.

At least Gillis thinks his jokes are funny? Maybe I’m just not the audience for Greenland/Iceland trivia that D2: The Mighty Ducks taught us a few decades ago and an admission that he can’t watch a Ken Burns documentary without falling asleep?