Shane Gillis is not funny.
The comedian and sitcom actor, 38, has made a careerout of making lowest-common-denominator jokes that are offensive, boring and lazy. His Netflix series, "Tires," is woefully dull. He could be mistaken for an extra in his own Bud Light commercials. And he has been on record making racist, sexist and homophobic comments and using slurs.
Shane Gillis is also successful. Yes, he was once fired from "Saturday Night Live" before he could even begin as a cast member because of his racist comments, yet he has been invited back to host. He has appeared on Joe Rogan's popular (and controversial) podcast. "Tires" has been renewed for multiple seasons. His stand-up shows routinely sell out. He has a platform of his own, and is routinely platformed
by respected comedy institutions like "SNL" and Netflix.
On Saturday Oct. 10, Gillis hosted "SNL" for his third stint and did two things: He said a four letter word on-air and called women "whores." At a moment in which the country is reckoning with the reality of misogyny and sexual assault after the alleged"Cornell 7" gang rape became national news in September, everyone seems more concerned with the f-bomb than the very popular man denigrating women and promoting rape culture on live television.
Gillis, as a human with access to the internet for the past month, has to be well aware of this conversation about sexism and rape as women share their stories of horrific assault and abuse, and the public reckons with the idea that allegedly 50 young men on a Snapchat thread were passive bystanders to an unspeakable crime.
While mothers on Instagram desperately try to share parenting tips designed to raise sons who do not grow up to ignore a rape in the fraternity house, while women on college campuses shake in fear for their personal safety, and protests conversations and emotions erupt all over the country, Shane Gillis decided to call women "whores" on national television.
The writers, producers and performers at "SNL" saw the so-called "joke" at dress rehearsal and decided to let him do it live. Someone, somewhere, decided it was funny to pretend that women are asking to be ogled and violated because of what they wear and where they wear it.
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” Gillis said. "Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. You’ve seen the shorts? They’re those neon, like, artificial bait-colored [shorts], and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look."
Where's the punchline? I don't know if Gillis has ever actually crafted a joke, but comedy is not just spouting every hateful thought you have in your brain to a captive audience.
Gillis described himself as a "comedian who pushes boundaries" during his "SNL" firing controversy in 2019, and said the clips in which he openly used a slur for East Asian people were misleading and divorced from their context.
No context has been left out of Gillis' comments this time. No boundaries are being pushed. There's an aphorism that when someone tells you who they are, you should listen. Gillis has never stopped telling us who he is. And that person is part of the problem in this country when it comes to how we talk about women and sexual assault. And he should be ashamed.
"SNL" should be more ashamed. Everyone at the 51-year-old sketch comedy show is also aware of the national conversation. Everyone there knows what power their platform wields. Everyone there knows the difference between funny and deeply wrong.
We've already litigated this. In 2012, comedian Daniel Tosh, while performing a set at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, Calif., made a statement about rape jokes always being funny. A woman in the audience yelled out, "Actually rape jokes are never funny!" Tosh responded by stating, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…"
A firestorm erupted, and comedians, particularly male comedians, were up in arms about what is "off limits" for comedy. Tosh did apologize in the end. High profile comedian Patton Oswalt, who originally defended the right of comedians to make jokes about anything including rape, reversed course and called his original stance "f---ing wrong." "I’m a man. I get to be wrong. And I get to change," Oswalt wrote in a lengthy 2013 blog post.
Fourteen years after Tosh did something harmful and wrong, Gillis has done it again. He didn't say the word "rape," but he participated in the culture that leads to it. Rape culture is not just men who sexually assault women. It is insidious comments designed to denigrate and make women small. It is jokes that women are so slutty and whore-ish that they are asking for anything a man wants to do with their bodies. They want men to "look," as Gillis says.
It is dehumanizing. It keeps women quiet. It keeps men emboldened to do more and take more. And it keeps the names of men like Gillis in the news, gathering views. It takes the spotlight off women like Jane Doe, who have been hurt more than any of us who are not survivors can contemplate. It makes the story, once again, about what men want.
It should not only be women saying this, and at least one man has recognized this. Dan Levy, a comedian, actor, producer and one-time "SNL" host, has also called Gillis out.
"Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores," Levy said in a video on Instagram. "It makes the men calling them whores misogynists. There's a difference there. .... This is not a women's issue. This is an everybody issue."
It is an everybody issue, including Shane Gillis. Maybe once he stops casually denigrating women, he can find the time to be funny.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Shane Gillis degraded women on 'SNL'. We aren't angry enough
