Saturday Night Live's favorite castoff Shane Gillis swears to do better

Shane Gillis is moving toward a potential Saturday Night Live record for most hosting gigs subsequent to being unequivocally fired from the show. Think about it: Some of the most famously axed cast members, like Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and Norm Macdonald, never became mainstay hosts for various reasons. More recent firings, like Jenny Slate, haven’t yet circled back to the no-hard-feelings return engagement, in Slate’s case perpetuating the myth that she was fired for exactly the word Gillis let slip in this week’s episode. Gillis sheepishly apologized a couple of times, and there’s no reason to think he won’t be pretty readily forgiven (including, granted, the fact that it’s not that big a deal). Somehow, he’ll manage to come out of this with Lorne Michaels still feeling like he owes the guy, and his own show, an ongoing home for a takeover of samey, vaguely mean-spirited sketch comedy every couple of years. For whatever reason, Michaels and the culture at large have decided that it’s important to make amends for attempting to stifle the comedy stylings of a guy who still thinks it’s funny to use “gay” the way a middle-schooler from 2003 would use it. This simply must be permitted. How else do you arrive at a stand-up topper like the observation that in today’s world, you’re either gay or Hitler, amirite?!

It is always a little heartening to observe the middling reaction Gillis receives when he does his just-plain-folks stand-up routine for SNL, a live crowd that rarely seems particularly elevated or comedy-geek persnickety about what gets them going. Gillis didn’t seem quite as uncomfortable in the room tonight as he has in past monologues, but for a guy who can apparently sell record-shattering numbers of tickets to a stadium-level stand-up show, like he’s Jelly Roll at the Sphere or something, he still manages to seem slightly out of his element in Studio 8H. There are probably plenty of Gillis fans who would see that as a badge of honor; maybe the man himself feels that way, too, though I imagine part of what’s won him such a dedicated fandom is his ability to project a kind of an underdog’s who-me shrug when one of his half-baked jokes doesn’t go over. But while his full sets may come across as more polished, his 10 minutes or so on SNL always feel like he’s rough-drafting his way through future material, not presenting fully formed jokes. A lot of it is predicated on name-calling, while a whole quasi-self-deprecating sidebar about getting insulted in a sauna takes on a kind of podcast-anecdote formlessness when it’s secondhand-delivered by Theo Von and Joe Rogan.

If you’re looking for better stand-up material, it tends to surface and then flop around in Gillis’s proper sketches. Assigning them that kind of ownership is probably an overstep; though some comedians do indeed bring along their own writers to contribute material, and it’s hard to imagine a guy as successful as Gillis purely giving himself over to the SNL staff for the week, it’s even more unlikely that the show was whole-cloth tailored to its host. Yet it does manage to feel that way, especially in the way that many of these sketches felt like stand-up concepts acted out: What’s up with that Green Eggs and Ham guy, why’s he so pushy? Why are they called “sneakers,” anyway? Are you really supposed to use them to “sneak”? And you know when that dad is looking at his daughter’s first wedding dance, he’s fantasizing about the stuff he might put in her room! All of these might have made for better stand-up routines than “it’s gay to touch your hair,” but as sketches, the episode got to the point where the premises became almost shockingly easy to intuit with surprising speed, even for formula-bound SNL. Gillis bedside by his elderly mother? Oh, got it, he’s going to be antsy about when she might actually die because it interferes with his other plans. Couple of nerdy-looking kid characters playing in a chess tournament, Gillis nowhere in sight quite yet? Then we must be waiting on a reveal that he’s doing something inappropriate in the crowd.

Not all of this was completely predictable and/or dire. The “My Room Now” song partially served as a parody of cornball country-pop sentiment delivered with the usual conviction by James Austin Johnson, Andrew Dismukes, and… Tommy Brennan?! What the-?! Well, why not? That commitment gave the escalating rhyme-defying ridiculousness of what turns out to be a dad’s black-mold hallucinations some extra kick (even if there was a clear strain of Gillis in the lol-what-a-cuck punchlines).

Moreover, it’s entirely possible to spin a good sketch out of extremely stand-up-coded material and even delivery; that’s been the case with Nate Bargatze’s episodes, particularly in the acknowledge classic “Washington’s Dream,” which isn’t actually a Bargatze routine, but absolutely sounds like it could be, and is all the funnier for it. So some of this episode’s failures must be Gillis, right? (Or, more charitably to the famous guy, must be me.) Look at the ad for “Upfront” air-conditioning repair. On paper, it’s pretty close to can’t-miss: The genre of fake SNL ad where the spokesman reads off a list of liabilities as if they are selling points, usually based in some kind of exaggerated version of a relatable circumstance, in this case being at the mercy of a repair job you can’t do yourself. Instead, the litany of unpleasant behaviors demonstrated by a scruffy crew of AC repairmen manages to somehow read as both classist (look at the disgusting riff-raff these places will send into your centrally air-conditioned home!) and weirdly bullying (is it funny to see these wimpy families get owned by a bunch of roughnecks?!). It’s the kind of mixture I don’t always realize business-as-usual SNL is able to pull off more often than not, until I see something like this fail to land.