As Trumpism wanes, SNL mistakes misogyny and homophobia for comedy

If anyone needed a sign that Saturday Night Live has completely lost its cultural and comedic compass, they need only watch the catastrophic opening monologue of Shane Gillis’s latest appearance.

I guess Gillis was attempting to shock the live studio audience when he blah-blah-blahed one of the unfunniest lines I have ever heard. Seriously. It wasn’t just useless and pointless; it was lazy. Gillis looks lazy, so I guess it all fits.

He frothed that you are either “gay or you’re Hitler.” If you laughed at that line, you are dumber than Gillis. It wasn’t just offensive. It was profoundly, and boy, do I mean profoundly, lame. Only morons laugh at “gay,” and only sickos think Hitler is even remotely funny.

Case in point: “gay.” At his recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump made a bizarre, hyper-fixated public evaluation of Sen. Jon Husted’s body. It relied on an outdated “locker room” aesthetic, using a defensive, homophobic punchline to demonstrate a form of objectification that Trump alone thinks is comedy. And those idiotic, homophobic Ohioans standing behind him were weirdly laughing.

And how about the way the GOP is treating James Talarico? Rather than focusing on policy, right-wing wackos like Kari Lake stooped to a humiliating new low by weaponizing Talarico’s routine flu recovery into a vulgar, transphobic conspiracy theory about him getting “bottom surgery.”

Related: Kari Lake turns James Talarico’s flu recovery into a ridiculous ‘bottom surgery’ conspiracy theory

And that’s the point. They are the only ones laughing at this stupid stuff.

Back to Gillis. His line didn’t get a ha-ha-ha from me because it relies on a truly exhausted, decades-old, intolerant comedy delivery that thinks casual bigotry is, for lack of a better word, edgy. For a 50-year-old American institution like SNL, letting Gillis host says a lot about how broken the show’s culture is. Bringing on a comedian whose entire style relies on cheap, outdated slurs shows a much deeper problem behind the scenes.

Frankly, I think the show demonstrated that it’s way behind where the culture is moving.

Because the real cultural story emerged after the show ended. SNL creator Lorne Michaels seemed content to let Gillis use the fabled Studio 8H stage to air out cheap shots at gays and women’s gym clothing. I mean, when he said “whores,” my mouth hit the floor.

Did anyone in the show’s hierarchy take a look at his monologue before he vomited it out? To me, the show is stuck in the gutter era of Trump’s “grab them by the p***y” and labeling gay men “p***ys.”

Thank almighty God we had Dan Levy come forward and deliver the ultimate critique of the evening.

Levy, a true gay icon — at least to me — and the beloved creator of the fantastic Schitt’s Creek, refused to let the misogyny slide. He publicly called on men to start speaking up when public figures demean women. In doing so, Levy didn’t just stand up for women; he exposed the sheer cowardice of the modern “anti-woke” comedy landscape.

Related: Dan Levy demands men speak up after Shane Gillis demeans women on SNL

Following his stand, Levy’s cultural stock seemed to have soared. I couldn’t believe how long Dan Levy was trending on Threads. He clearly eclipsed the cynical, fleeting engagement of Gillis’s fan base. I think audiences rallied around Levy because he proved that true cultural relevance doesn’t come from lambasting women or gays. It comes from a place of integrity.

Levy showed that a gay man holding the line for women is infinitely more powerful and culturally resonant than a hack, straight “comedian” hiding behind indolent slurs.

This highlights the creative “white space” SNL has left wide open. The show is trapped because Trumpism broke the standard comedy formula, and the initial offensiveness of his political style is rapidly waning.

Look no further than a Property Brothers parody from a November 2025 episode, in which Miles Teller played both property brothers as they helped Donald and Melania Trump navigate White House renovations. The sketch featured James Austin Johnson’s Trump rambling about demolishing the East Wing and turning the Rose Garden into an Olive Garden seating area.

I found myself offering only polite, tepid chuckles. Why? Because it was clear the sketch couldn’t compare to the daily reality of what Trump is actually doing to the White House, which, by the way, isn’t funny anyway.

According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked into the Oval Office one morning to find Donald Trump personally using super glue to attach tacky gold appliqués and ornaments to the fireplace mantel.

Quite frankly, that reality looked like a parody of the Property Brothers sketch.

Traditional parody requires a grounded baseline of reality to subvert. Right? But when reality is already self-satirizing, and when real people are doing cartoonish things, well, it becomes difficult for a sketch to outdo the real world. The only medium capable of effectively mocking this era is animation, like South Park (or South America), because its universe is boundless and not subject to the limitations of human imitation. In other words, its characters can exhibit unlimited buffoonery.

In 2026, SNL can offer only pale, redundant, and sanitized reflections.

Trapped by this reality, SNL made a desperate bet on Gillis to act buffoonish. Was it intentional? Was the thinking something like this: “We can’t out-Trump Trump, but can we be more outrageous by selecting a host who is even more boorish than Trump?”

Look, SNL didn’t bring Shane Gillis back for his writing skills. It did so to leech off his culture-war immunity, at least for the moment. It’s proof that the show is completely out of ideas. Letting him get away with casual slurs is just a Hail Mary to try to buy back the “edginess” its writers are no longer capable of producing on their own.

The tragic irony for SNL is that the broader culture appears to be experiencing exhaustion with Trump-era misogyny and homophobia, or at least, I hope it is. After all, people seem to be moving on from the Trump dance that became popular after his reelection.

Trumpism didn’t just ruin SNL’s ability to mock the president. It exposed a show completely out of ideas. Instead of challenging power, SNL now offers cowardly compromises like toothless pre-tapes paired with an a-hole dropping slurs on live television. The problem isn’t that the show can’t out-Trump Trump. It’s that, in desperately trying to keep up, SNL forgot how to be funny.

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