Shane Gillis mocked for 'Saturday Night Live' monologue after lukewarm response from studio audience

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: It looks like Shane Gillis delivered a rather lukewarm set on 'Saturday Night Live' this weekend. 

Hired in 2019 as a cast member, he was fired before he got to make his debut when old clips resurfaced of him making offensive jokes about gay people and people of Asian descent.

The comedian did, however, have one powerful supporter in the legendary Norm Macdonald—who himself had been fired from 'SNL' for refusing to stop making OJ Simpson jokes. While Macdonald backed him, Gillis was out of luck.

Surprisingly, Gillis was invited back in February 2024 as a host, and his comeback was actually well-received.

However, things appeared to take a nosedive this weekend. His second shot at an 'SNL' monologue went over like a lead balloon, per critics at least.

It just wasn't Shane Gillis' night

The vibe was off from the moment Shane Gillis took the stage. His jokes about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and even Ken Burns documentaries failed to land properly, the Daily Mail reported.

At one point, after a Biden joke didn't get much of a reaction, he tried to explain it away. "Look, I get it, you’re pretty liberal here," he complained. He then awkwardly admitted midway through: "All right, I don’t know how to get out of this joke."

His opening shots at Trump—mocking the president for his "fifth-grade level ideas," like renaming the Gulf of Mexico or annexing Greenland—earned little more than polite chuckles. "Now I want Greenland. I never even thought about Greenland. Now it’s all I think about," the 37-year-old quipped.

Swinging back at Biden, Gillis poked fun at the former president’s vacant expressions between teleprompter reads. "My favorite thing about Biden was, anytime he was given a speech, in between teleprompters his face would go back to being dead," he joked while doing a Biden impression.

But then he tried to save himself. "You’re pretty liberal here," he noted, before joking that liberals must feel "powerful like a Sith."

When he sensed the crowd slipping away, he further cracked: "I’m going to lose you even more." He then made a joke about White men nervously asking their girlfriends if they’d ever been with a Black man before.

Gillis followed that up with a joke about the Burns documentary on the Civil War. He claimed the filmmaker's work made women "fall asleep immediately," before delivering the punch line: "That’s a Cosby tip for you: Who needs roofies when we have Ken Burns presents the history of the buffalo on PBS?"

Internet roasts Shane Gillis over 'painfully unfunny' monologue

If Shane Gillis thought the student audience was bad, the critics on social media were brutal.

One said, "Shane Gillis just won the award for the most painfully unfunny monologue possibly ever," and another wrote, "Shane Gillis's monologue is so awful I've had it muted the whole time due to second-hand embarrassment."

"It's impressive how bad Shane Gillis is at the SNL monologue. hard to believe he actually got the job all those years ago," a person snarked, while someone else shared, "Watching the Shane Gillis monologue with my family and my 9-year-old sister turned to me and said, 'This guy doesn’t have very good jokes.'"

"This Shane Gillis monologue is not funny at all. The way he laughs at his own 'jokes' makes it even more awkward. I haven't watched him much. Is he always this...unfunny?" a comment read.

"Shane Gillis is really bad on SNL. Like, really really really bad. The monologue was a flop, he had 2 lines in his first sketch, there’s 0 charisma, and not a single audience laugh. No wonder he got fired," another person chimed in.

And even his fans had to admit—this one was rough.

"Shane Gillis is hilarious and always hits but man he was off with that monologue. Have to be honest he bombed. Not sure what happened there hahaha," one remarked, while another added, "Shane Gillis opening monologue sucked a**. Big time disappointment."

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