In a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live,” comedian Shane Gillis delivered an opening monologue that suggested both he and the show were better off for having followed separate trajectories. Gillis, who has since become a popular standup and podcaster, was announced to be an “S.N.L.” cast member in September 2019. Just days later, “S.N.L.” reversed course and dropped him from its lineup, following criticism of resurfaced podcast segments in which Gillis used a slur to describe Chinese people and performed a caricature accent, and used a homophobic slur to refer to the filmmaker Judd Apatow and the comedian Chris Gethard, as well as the presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Senator Bernie Sanders.
Gillis returned to “S.N.L.” nearly five years later as a guest host but did not take a scorched-earth approach in his monologue, like when Norm Macdonald appeared as a host in 1999 after he had been fired from the show. He joked that he “probably shouldn’t be up here, honestly,” adding that he was biologically designed to be a high school football coach. He also teased his father, who was shown in the studio audience and whom Gillis said was a volunteer assistant girls’ high school basketball coach. Gillis then spoke about having family members with Down syndrome. He dodged it, but it almost got him.
Playing off the bemused reaction of his studio audience, Gillis joked, “Look, I don’t have any material that can be on TV, all right? I’m trying my best. Also, this place is extremely well-lit. This is the most nervous I’ve ever been.” In an election year, “S.N.L.” recognizes that it cannot kick off every broadcast with Mikey Day impersonating President Biden and James Austin Johnson playing his likely Republican rival, former President Donald Trump. Some weeks you’re going to get Johnson as Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Day as… Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho?
In a brighter glimpse of what Gillis’s “S.N.L.” tenure might have looked like if he had stayed on as a cast member, the show parlayed his abilities as a Trump impressionist into a cleverly satirical movie trailer. Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on the 2024 presidential election and the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children. They began by discussing the South Carolina primary, which means that Donald Trump is now undefeated everywhere except in court. They then reacted to Jost’s surprise that he would be talking about Women’s History Month, sassily skewering historical figures like Amelia Earhart and Florence Nightingale.