Shane Gillis’ Second Time Hosting Saturday Night Live is a Repetitive Snoozefest

We’re back. After a month away, Saturday Night Live returned last night, helmed by Shane Gillis. In the interim, we got SNL50, which was nostalgic, spontaneously funny, far too long and, generally, familial. I won’t retread what happened during the anniversary special, but you can read TV editor Garrett Martin’s review of the program here.

Gillis and SNL have been linked for the last five, six years, as the 37-year-old comedian was fired from the show in 2019 after clips of him using racial and homophobic slurs on a podcast surfaced almost immediately after his hiring was announced. This week, he entered the news again when Bowen Yang, once again, shot down speculation that the SNL vet was responsible for Gillis’ firing. It seems that Lorne Michaels finds all of that to be water under the bridge now anyway, as Gillis was invited to host the show in February 2024 as a gesture of goodwill, I guess? His turn was met with mixed reviews from critics, including our former SNL correspondent Dennis Perkins, who panned the episode, saying, “Gillis came off like a past-his-prime athlete called on to host, complete with hesitant line readings, awkward transitions, and cue card dependancy.” Remember that sentence.

You could argue that Gillis has had a redemption arc since his firing, but I wouldn’t. He was never cancelled, and, ever since, has become one of the most beloved stand-up comedians, hosts a popular podcast, inked a Netflix deal for an original series called Tires and is seen rubbing shoulders with the likes of Eminem, Peyton Manning and Post Malone. His frat bro humor is a mainstay on TikTok FYPs (even mine, unwillingly) and, undoubtedly, he is an A-lister in his industry, and SNL has embraced him. Gillis even claimed that the show asked him to impersonate Donald Trump for Season 50, but that he turned the offer down.

Gillis joins the likes of John Mulaney, Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle, stand-up comics who’ve hosted multiple times. Now, do I think Gillis is primed for a five-timer’s club induction, or SNL immortality, or even a regular gig on the show? He’s got a long road to go if that’s his destiny. His inaugural hosting stint last year was relatively boring and flawed throughout, making his sudden return to Studio 8H this season a puzzling one. But Gillis is going to bring in viewers, and he’s going to make some noise.

Last night, Gillis got off to a slow start in his monologue, flirting with bombing before finally settling in during a long joke about Civil War historians. There was even a point where he took jabs at himself, trying to land on his feet once the audience stopped playing along with his jokes (they weren’t even in his corner to begin with, really). He’s always toed the line in his humor, mocking liberals progressives and conservatives. It being the second Trump presidency, and an already-disastrous one at that, it quickly became obvious that the crowd wasn’t ready for any gotcha moments about liberals, at least not from someone who looks like your old high school buddy who gets his political news from Facebook.

In sketches, Gillis has his niche—playing the whitest, lamest guy in the room—and the writers do their best to work around that limited mobility. And sometimes it works! But it’s a formula you can only draw from so many times in 90 minutes before you start begging for the clock to hit 1 AM. Any episode he’s in is sure to include a lot of disrespectful, sorry-excuse dads. It can make for an unchallenging episode, but sometimes SNL needs a week of simplicity to anchor itself back into whatever momentum was lost during their off-air break. Unfortunately, Gillis doesn’t quite have the charm to make even a scaled-back, without-risk episode feel at all exciting. A year ago, you could blame his lackluster hosting performance on nerves, or the all-eyes-on-you, make-or-break environment SNL fosters. Gillis is a year older and much more famous now, but he’s still not ready for primetime.

How did last night’s episode fare? Well, as a wise cue card says…

“Live from New York…”

In the weeks since SNL was last on the air, there have been quite a number of blockbuster news stories—the Gulf of Mexico changed to the Gulf of America on Apple Maps, the tariff debacle with Canada, mass deportations, trans people being barred from the military, Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, drone strikes at Chernobyl, the Grammy Awards… the list goes on. But, it was easiest for the show to settle on something much more recent: Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky. In real life, the exchange was a trainwreck, with Trump and JD Vance both spiraling out and berating Zelensky. It was the kind of melodrama and “What the fuck did I just watch?” entertainment that immediately beckons an SNL sketch—or, more importantly, it’s the type of real-world encounter that is so absurd that not even the SNL writing team could come up with something so shocking.

But, this was a good chance for the show to let James Austin Johnson do a Trump riff, to the point where Zelensky (Mikey Day) is barely even present in the sketch. The CEO of “Gaza Hotel & Casino” welcomes Zelensky into his “big, beautiful trap” and declares that he, Vance (Bowen Yang) and Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernandez) are going to “attack him very soon for no reason.” It’s a pretty vanilla first-half of the sketch, as Trump celebrates Star Trek’s lack of DEI, quotes Tom Petty and explains all of the cards he’s holding, which includes skip, draw four, reverse, get out of jail free (“the Supreme Court gave me that one”), Pikachu, Charmander and Charizard. All he’s missing is Charmeleon! In comes my favorite line of the cold open: “The Russians have been treated very badly, with respect to the war. And, also, frankly, Anora—Anora was misled, and she fell in love. And now, she might even lose to Brutalist.”

I do like it when Trump reprimands Zelensky’s lack of ring kissing, saying, “You don’t compliment the ties, you don’t say ‘thank you.’ You don’t tell us how hot we look, you don’t say ‘if I was gay, I’d be all over you, too.’” But, the best part of this sketch is Yang’s impression of Vance, which shines because of the obvious gay-for-Trump energy he brings to the vice president’s pitifully embarrassing aura. Vance is an Ohioan, therefore the grudges I hold towards him for his rhetoric are all the more magnified because he is forever linked to my home state. But Vance is also an easy target, and I enjoy seeing him mocked in any and all forums. And Yang’s choice to make him into a flamboyant, self-consumed, eye-liner-wearing bootlicker is barely even an impression at this point—the vice president really is just that much of a sell-out loser rid of human decency.

The worst part of the cold open comes in the second-half, when Mike Myers returns to SNL to do a half-good impression of Elon Musk. Don’t get me wrong, Myers has got the pro-apartheid son of a South African mine owner’s mannerisms exactly right, looking like a barrel-chested man-toddler hopping around after taking amphetamines. But the issue with his impression of Musk is that he doesn’t capture the Tesla deadbeat’s way of speaking. To be quite honest, it sounds far more like Dr. Evil than Elon Musk, though there’s an argument to be made that Musk is the closest living thing to Austin Powers’ nemesis/brother. It’s a little too British for me. The highlight of Musk’s segment is when Andrew Dismukes shows up as a 19-year-old business kid named “Big Balls.” Together, he and Musk have founded the Department of Undoing Child Healthcare and Education—aka, “DOUCHE.” There have been better cold opens this season and, like the country policy’s at-large, this sketch gets worse when Musk is involved.

“You look mahvelous!”

This season’s immediate post-Update sketches have been pretty lackluster, but we got a banger last night, finally. I really love an SNL bit that is just a universal idea stretched into a four-minute punchline. This time, it was the act of substituting physical gifts with well-meaning, affectionate coupons. We’ve all done this to a significant other or even a parent, and it’s entertaining getting to see my life become less and less unique because a couple of writers also are sometimes too cheap to buy real presents.

The idea in this sketch is simple: One of Angela’s (Sarah Sherman) ex-boyfriends interrupts her wedding to cash in on the never-expiring “one free handjob” coupon she gave him as a gift years prior. She argues that it was a joke gift and that it doesn’t count anymore, but then her husband-to-be (Devon Walker) pulls out a coupon of his own—for one free night of butt stuff, before or after dinner—and says that both offers are valid.

Angela even used the same kind of paper and calligraphy for both coupons, which was a nice touch. Suddenly, everyone in her wedding has a coupon—her dad, her maid-of-honor and, most importantly, the priest. She keeps calling the priest a judge, to which we get one of my favorite Kenan Thompson line deliveries of the season so far: “Can’t be no judge with the record I have.” Add an extra minute to this sketch and it would have gone stale fast, so I’m impressed with SNL for not letting the joke overstay its welcome.

“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”

Last night featured a relatively safe Weekend Update vaulted out of the trenches by some solid character work. It starts with Jost wondering if, in the wake of Zelensky’s meeting with Trump, you’ll be able to start betting on World War III on FanDuel. We get a take on Trump’s A.I.-generated video featuring bearded belly dancers and one of his hotels now built in Gaza, and Che calls it an “ISIS recruitment ad.” Jost reveals Elon Musk’s “5 Things I Did Last Week” list, which included getting a woman pregnant five times, and he brings up the A.I. video of Trump kissing Musk’s toes, which reportedly played on internal TV monitors at the offices of Housing and Urban Development (“You can tell the video is A.I. because, in it, Trump is able to bend”).

Che tackles Ron DeSantis’ gay boots, a couple forced into sitting next to a dead body on a flight, a one-armed woman scoring in a basketball game (cue one of Che’s always-dependable punchlines about the inferiority of women here), $10,000 worth of cocaine being smuggled in a wig, while Jost comments on RFK Jr. eating the dead birds that washed up on Long Island Beach, a theater collapsing on “surprised but grateful” patrons during a screening of Captain America: Brave New World, the first-ever Black daytime soap opera, Dunkin Donuts no longer charging for plant-based milk (“but they will keep calling you a pussy”) and Karla Sofia Gascón’s racist tweets about George Floyd—the latter of which resulted in the best joke of Update:

“The Oscar campaign for Best Picture nominee Emilia Pérez was badly damaged after problematic old tweets about George Floyd surfaced from transgender star Karla Sofia Gascón. And I think we can all agree: What?”

Marcello Hernandez unveiled a new character last night, the Movie Guy—aka, a thick-accented bellhop who has a lot of opinions about movies but has seen very few of them. Talking about Conclave, he says: “This movie has to be about the Pope, right?” It’s a shtick as old as SNL itself, one that reminds me, in spirit, of Chris Farley’s Bennett Brauer. Hernandez’s Movie Guy is SNL’s Oscars correspondent, though he is far more interested in SpongeBob Squarepants, whom he calls “Bom Bom.” The only Best Picture nominee he’s seen is The Brutalist. “This movie is about an architect, and he escaped from a concentration camp and then he wants to build something. And you know what he built? He built a pineapple under the sea for Bom Bom!” Hernandez breaks a few times and it’s all pretty jolly, even if it’s a reheated joke. I was fairly pleased with the material.

“Dating expert” Jane Wickline comes back to Update with a new song in tow, this one about wooing a crush but told through different verses about the Trolley Problem. You either gel with Wickline’s sense of humor or you don’t, and I had a good time following her down every rabbit hole, as she took a handful of routes towards devotion but always ended up at those trolley tracks. Out of the three Update songs she’s performed this season, this one is easily the best—and it was paced perfectly, an SNL rarity. Thank goodness for Hernandez and Wickline. Otherwise, it would have been a listless night of Update.

“Who’s the barber here?”

“Mid-Day News 2” is a sequel to a Phoebe Waller-Bridge-led sketch from 2019, and the premise is two Black news anchors and two white news anchors react to the race of each person involved in the night’s top stories, most of which are crime-related. This type of sketch makes far more sense with Gillis at the table instead of Waller-Bridge; I actually buy into him playing the type of white guy who would make something like this a competition in real life, and his chemistry with Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim, both of whom were in the first iteration of the concept five years ago, had potential. But “Mid-Day News 2” is a gambit well-worn in the SNL history books, posing as an exploration of stereotypes as the anchors argue over the identities of meth addicts, looters, teachers dating students, drivers in a traffic jam and a barber shop shooter but rid of its teeth. A funny moment does come when Nwodim reveals that there was a violent altercation at a Shaboozey concert. “Who the heck is Shaboozey?” Thompson asks. “He’s a genius,” Gillis replies, “but this sounds like us.” The constant score checks pulled a good reaction out of me. This is a sketch that, at times, punches above its weight class but never quite knows where it really wants to land.

“In a word? Chaos.”

I am a fan of Please Don’t Destroy’s shorts, and some of their best work this season has been canned after the dress rehearsal. The trio snuck into the show last night, though, just before Tate McRae’s pre-Update performance, and added an exciting riff on The Voice to an otherwise listless 90 minutes. Now, it’s far from the strongest thing Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy have put together, but “The Sound” was an award-worthy performance in the company of such miscalculated and uninspired material.

The trio, along with Ego Nwodim, play various iterations of country and pop stars not unlike the Blake Sheltons and Adam Levines who’ve graced any and all of the ridiculous, cash-grabbing, musical reality shows on basic cable. With their backs turned to a prospective competitor, they’re hit with the voice of an angel. The mystery man, Reggie (Gillis), sings with spell-binding soul. But, when they all hit their “yes” button, an electric wheelchair-riding, big-rimmed-glasses wearing, thin-haired weirdo awaits them. He doesn’t fit into The Sound’s picture-perfect pop star mold, and the judges revoke their yeses. His greatest influence is Chris Brown and he’s 56 but Snapchats with underage girls. Somehow, even after the judges’ collective disgust keeps him out of “The Sound,” he gets a feature on a Tate McCrae song. It’s enjoyable stuff; Gillis again polishes up his penchant for off-kilter, problematic oddballs.

“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”

I’m genuinely baffled that “Winery Tour” not only made it past dress rehearsal, but that it was selected to be the first post-monologue sketch. Surely anything is better than watching Heidi Gardner and Shane Gillis play the most annoying and deranged cusp-millennial couple you absolutely know in real life. The girlfriend spots an orange tree on her tour with her boyfriend and his parents (Andrew Dismukes, Ashley Padilla) and tediously makes him take dozens of photos of her standing in front of it, cycling through various poses and facial expressions. When Gillis delivers a few lines through baby-talk, I want to turn my TV off. I know he’s supposed to be playing a loser, but I can smell his discomfort through the screen. I have to applaud Gardner for really going all-in on a character she could’ve easily saved for an Update bit but, honestly, “Winery Tour” is just deeply, deeply unfunny—easily one of the season’s worst sketches yet.

“If you have a $50 bill, we can give you 50 singles.”

Along with a Please Don’t Destroy film, we got the pre-recorded “CouplaBeers,” one of those disrespectful, sorry-excuse dad bits I mentioned earlier. It’s an easy concept: a delusional father/husband (Gillis) is failing at his marriage, at being a parent and at being a co-worker. So, in his state of depression, he gets prescribed CouplaBeers, and it’s exactly that—two beers styled like a pill bottle, a “revolutionary medicine that treats anxiety and depression fast.” With CouplaBeers, he’s now confident, slurring, pantsing his co-workers and a little bit drowsy at his desk. When that fatigue sets in, have your doctor prescribe you aLilBump (which comes with its own key). All of this leads to an intervention, as the camera shows Gillis wearing a suit and tie but no pants. This sketch didn’t make me laugh once, but I wasn’t praying for it to end, either.

“It’s always something.”

“Dad’s House” was on my screen for four-and-a-half minutes, yet it felt like it came and went much quicker than that. It’s a PBS show that airs before Caillou, and it’s about a divorced dad whose kids are staying at his house for a weekend. The dad (Gillis)—a lot of dad material last night, eh?—is excited and sober, and he just barely remembers his children’s names. “Dad’s House” poses the question: “What if we made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood but it’s about the problematic, alcoholic neighbor you’ve been living next to for years. The word of the day is “alimony,” dinner is a plate of Vienna sausages doused in maple syrup, and Dad’s new girlfriend, Bridgette, is a blond-haired puppet waiting for an Uber. Dad gives his worrisome, panicky ex-wife (Ashley Padilla) a call. She tells him to go to Hell and he replies with a defeated “I love you.” It’s a white-guy version of “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” but without Eddie’s punch; Gillis was leaning heavily on the cue cards here, and the pacing felt majorly off with this one.

“Your very precious lunch hour…”

Shane Gillis’ brand of comedy sometimes clicks for me because it’s a personification of the things my friends and I joked about behind closed doors when we were 17 years old. So SNL letting Gillis run free in a sketch where he runs into an old classmate (Emil Wakim) who, supposedly, gave himself a blowjob in 8th grade but is now a doctor (they used to call him “Mr. DIY”). A joke like this exists in the vocabulary of people who really loved bringing up that folktale about Marilyn Manson removing his ribs so he could suck his own dick—and then the sketch goes ahead and makes that joke, too. At the end of the day, “Doctor’s Visit” is just three minutes of Gillis finding new ways to phrase self-oral, and him posing the question on everyone’s mind: Can he still do it? And by it, he means “use your slinky as a binky.” The answer is no, but the doctor misses it, because nobody will ever please him the way he could please himself. Gillis is really good at pinning a laugh onto masculine tropes, onto the bathroom humor that’s somehow outdated yet always relevant. It caters to some kind of audience, certainly. He’d be really good at a sketch about naming obscure basketball players, I’m sure, but I think “Doctor’s Visit” probably should have died after the dress rehearsal.

Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings

1. Ego Nwodim
The ensemble was pretty spread out last night, but I really enjoyed Ego Nwodim’s showing. She was good in “Mid-Day News 2” and stood out in the Please Don’t Destroy film.

2. Kenan Thompson
Kenan was only in two sketches last night, “Mid-Day News 2” and “Wedding Interuption,” but he was on his A-game even in a limited role. Whether he’s dropping one-liners as a news anchor or doing asides as a firecracker priest misidentified as a judge, he was in top form.

3. Heidi Gardner
Heidi gets a nod here out of necessity, as she was in the most sketches (“Winery Tour,” “Mid-Day News 2” and “CouplaBeers”) and largely relegated to playing Gillis’ wife/significant other. None of the material really allowed for her to flex her full range, but she was a big presence last night regardless.

Goodnights

My brainrot made me laugh at Shane Gillis’ impression of Palpatine saying “Do it!” more than I care to admit.

I loved how Sarah Sherman is becoming the glue in so many sketches. She really pulled “Wedding Interruption” together, turning it into the best sketch of the night. Without her, it’s bottom-tier.

David Johansen got a RIP title card after performing twice on the show as Buster Poindexter. Farewell to the last New York Doll.

Canada is not for sale!

SNL returns next week with Lady Gaga pulling double duty. And that’s the way it is! Goodnight.