Well, that was certainly of a piece.
Say this for Shane Gillis: Now that he’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice, it’s harder to assume that had he kept his featured-player spot back in Season 45, he would have become the Jeff Richards of the 2020s, an odd bro out in an eclectic ensemble. Richards just seemed vaguely adrift in his short time on the show, connecting with the odd impression or his one Weekend Update character, but not really vibing with the rest of the cast or giving a clear idea of his own vibe. With Gillis, there’s a clear sensibility at work in “his” sketches, and maybe there just would have been a whole lot more of that stuff, satisfying Lorne Michaels’ nagging feeling that the show was reaching out to an untapped portion of the audience that actively wants less out of SNL.
Then again, maybe Gillis staying occupied by doing a bunch of terrible SNL sketches (and presumably appearing in the occasional good one) would have laid more immediately bare his CBS-sitcom-sensibility, rather than gussying it up with edgelord podcast cred and the weird parasocial connections that go along with it. I’m sorry, I don’t get it. I’m sure Gillis is a good hang if you’re his actual friend; he seems affable enough to let himself be the butt of a joke. But the thing is, that’s never really borne out in many of the SNL sketches he’s done. It’s not as if he plays the overt hero, exactly. Yet even in sketches where the joke is about his character being a loser, a dumb guy, a bad father, whatever, there’s this undercurrent of hostility towards everyone else in his orbit that isn’t just sour, and doesn’t just turn Gillis into the would-be identification point as a default (though it is and does do that). It also—more importantly—renders most of the jokes predictable, even mechanical in their joylessness.
Take this week’s “Dad’s House” sketch, built on a totally solid foundation. It has notes of Andy Samberg-era observational-meets-conceptual sketches like “The New Boyfriend Talk Show” and “My Brother Knows Everything,” where common relationship awkwardness has the frame of a cheerful TV broadcast—here the idea being a kids’ show hosted by a weekend-custody dad who isn’t that great at taking care of kids. It’s a funny idea, right down to having the dad’s new girlfriend played by a kid-show-style puppet. And the execution is almost uniformly terrible, with stale “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” knockoffs (the word of the day is “alimony,” yuk yuk!) and other jokes predicated on how the dad doesn’t really know or like his kids, and thinks the girl he just slept with is a filthy slut! There’s no second level or escalation or anything: The sketch tells you right up front that this is a dumb loser dad who sucks, and then you start the timer on when he’ll get impotently mad about his ex’s new boyfriend. Good sketch actors can make this stuff seem specific and stick in your brain. Gillis seems to focus a lot of energy on containing a smirk.
He sure got a lot of those out in his monologue, though he did also seem genuinely nervous, with little bursts of laughter as he seemed to turn over how well particular jokes might go over seconds before or after he decided to just go ahead and tell them anyway. Whether calculated or not, it would be endearing if the jokes themselves weren’t so barely-formed. Let me get this straight: The long build-up to the joke about a white guy asking his girlfriend if she’s had sex with a Black guy was all in service of recalling a time where a guy was kinda racist, and then someone else was more racist, and then we’re all supposed to giggle about the naughtiness of that? No observation, no further twist? Just a weak callback like two jokes later? This is your guy?! Does he ever, you know… score? I found some of Dave Chappelle’s and Bill Burr’s recent monologue jokes kinda scattershot or lazy, but I know they can get big, surprising laughs. Gillis is out here reheating his “Biden corpse, Trump kinda dumb, but it’s cool” routine. That dopey simplicity found its way into so much material in this episode: most of the sketches, the fake ad, the Please Don’t Destroy video.
Look, I know if you’re reading this and you dig Gillis’s stuff, this will sound enormously personal. (I reviewed his simul-sitcom Tires, so I know what I’m talking about, both in terms of Gillis playing a few bad notes incessantly, and getting called names by randos for, uh, not liking a show on Netflix—a bias the likes of which has never been seen in this entertainment industry, in other words.) But I’d love an actual explanation of why, say, the “CouplaBeers” ad is supposed to be funny. The list of “conditions” that might require the prescription including “Museum” got a chuckle out of me. But “I need a couple of beers, dude” is not a new joke and it’s not even an especially new way of making an old joke. (“Heroin AM” already went there and went a bit harder.) And that was one of the less shaky sketches of the night. I gather that a lot of people find watching and listening to Gillis similar to goofing around with their loosest, least censorious buddies, and criticizing him akin to someone sneering at their pal. I just can’t figure out how to not see the sneer coming from Gillis himself. Even when he’s trying to be the butt of the joke, it somehow feels less self-deprecating than making up a thin character he can try to bully from the inside.
What was on
Jane Wickline’s Weekend Update love song that kept veering unavoidably into stress over how to navigate the trolley problem was the funniest bit of the night. The show’s pretapes, especially music videos, are what always garner Lonely Island comparisons, but Wickline’s hyper-fixation on a single cultural reference point felt more DIY Lonely Island than, say, the limp <em>Voice</em> parody that Please Don’t Destory put together. Also, fair credit to Gillis: He made a perfectly OK straight man in the leadoff sketch with Heidi Gardner as the girlfriend demanding infinite photo takes for her Instagram. Was the sketch good? In structure or overall point, not particularly. But performance-wise, yes; Gardner and Gillis both had their moments, and Ashley Padilla had one epically slow-burn reaction.
What was off
Another good sketch idea absolutely biffed by the weird tone, whether from Gillis or the writers: The ex-boyfriend turning up to a wedding bearing a cute sex coupon from the bride’s previous relationship. The escalating additional coupons is a good gag, but when three of the other four are all for sex stuff, again: sour! It centers the vindication of the creep who wants sex, rather than the characterization of the girl who friends and family no longer trust because of her potentially insincere coupons. Comedy isn’t just humiliation.
Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)
It’s Jane Wickline, for making me laugh in an otherwise pretty tepid 90 minutes.
Next time
Lady Gaga pulls double duty for the first time in twelve years (!) and also joins the five-timers’ club for musical guests (is that a thing that counts?).
Stray observations
- • Is Elon Musk the first person to ever be impersonated by both Dana Carvey and Mike Myers on SNL? Would that be a third record he could add to “world’s richest man” and “world’s dumbest guy”? It’s fascinating that they decided Carvey’s take wasn’t broad enough; Myers isn’t really a finely tuned impressionist, but there’s something satisfyingly mean about having him just purely caricature Musk; I almost wish the sketch had just been given over to him.
- • Because oh, yeah, speaking of the cold open: The Zelensky thing was obviously going to be the angle, but James Austin Johnson’s version of Trump doesn’t really capture the pure nastiness of the man; the stupidity and pettiness and TV-personality vacuousness, he has absolutely down (in addition to all the technical stuff, of course), but the abject cruelty isn’t quite there, and Bowen Yang’s JD Vance doesn’t have the sauce to make up for it. Perhaps SNL‘s greatest policy failure of the past six months has been an inability to find a take on Vance beyond “he would probably find it vexing to be played by Bowen Yang, we guess.”
- • Weird sorta-trivia: the WAMU “mid-morning news” sketch where news stories devolve into racial scorekeeping was one of those long-range recurring bits; they did it once before. (There have been other sketches with Ego and Kenan as news anchors sparring with white coworkers, but not the exact same framework.) When, you may ask? In the second episode of Season 45, which is to say just a couple of weeks after Gillis was pre-season-fired. That could be why this version just straight up repeated it; fair game considering it was five and a half years ago, but as a de facto episode highlight, it’s not too impressive.
- • Maybe I shouldn’t have reviewed this episode, because I do see from my notes that I am “extremely woke” and “hate comedy.”
