Shane Gillis Blames Tate McRae Fans for His ‘SNL’ Monologue Disaster
Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time back in 2024, complete with an irony-free sketch about an office HR meeting starring the guy who was fired from the show in 2019.
Gillis returned to host Saturday Night Live for a second time this past March. And while his fans no doubt enjoyed the appearance, others weren’t so thrilled with the episode. Especially controversial was the opening monologue, in which Gillis casually riffed on Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and delved into his own admittedly “racist” insecurity over his girlfriend’s diverse sexual history.
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The crowd’s reaction to the monologue was mixed at best, but coming from the typically over-charitable SNL audience, the performance was quickly labeled a “bomb” by the media, and criticized for its tone-deafness.
But if you ask Gillis what went wrong, he’ll tell you that the real problem wasn’t his material, it was… pop music fans?
The comedian recently guested on the Smartless podcast, and was praised by co-host Will Arnett for his jokes about Ken Burns’ Civil War docuseries, and specifically historian Shelby Foote. But Gillis pointed out that they didn’t go over too well on SNL. “I did a bunch of Ken Burns material in my SNL monologue, and everyone was kind of like, ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’” Gillis explained. “Every time my monologue doesn’t go great on SNL — I’m 0 for 2 on those things.”
According to Gillis, the monologue fell flat purely because of the young crowd. “Tate McRae was the musical guest, so the audience was like 20-year-old chicks just in the front,” Gillis claimed, “and I’m up there talking about Shelby Foote and Ken Burns and the Civil War. They had no idea — just some ogre walked out on the stage and started talking about Shelby Foote.”
But Gillis’ assessment of the routine omits some important details. For one thing, he had already lost the crowd (and even commented on that fact) several times prior to the Ken Burns jokes, most notably when he compared “liberals” to the evil Sith from Star Wars.
And while a number of people didn’t laugh during the Civil War bit, that likely had less to do with the fact that Tate McRae fans are incapable of understanding the concept of a historical documentary, and more to do with the fact that one of the punchlines literally involved date rape. Gillis joked that Burns’ work could be used to knock women unconscious if they “yap a little,” adding “that’s a little Cosby tip for you. Who needs roofies when we have Ken Burns Presents the History of the Buffalo on PBS?”
It should also be said that these conspicuously tasteless jokes came around halfway through a monologue that lasted for nearly eight minutes, making it the sixth-longest in the show’s history. That’s more than two minutes longer than Adrien Brody’s seemingly endless Oscar speech.
It’s also possible that people in the audience had already heard those Shelby Foote jokes on someone else’s podcast years earlier.
