Can the stand-up comedian get a second chance at a first impression?
Can you believe it has already/only been two years since stand-up comedian Shane Gillis received an invitation to Saturday Night Live’s featured cast, only to get disinvited days later after an online firestorm over his past podcasts?
By the way. Sidebar: Labor Day weekend and the days thereafter generally find cast members and writers coming to or leaving SNL employment, but nothing has leaked out yet this year?! Wonder if that silence has anything to do with Lorne Michaels and his desperate bid to Stockholm Syndrome everyone into staying with him through Season 50…
Not that Gillis has to worry about that any longer.
After the initial blowback from the media (social and mainstream) and the superficial blows to his still-in-development comedy reputation, Gillis weathered the storm and making jokes onstage about his plight the very night SNL Season 45 debuted without him, 34 blocks due north of The Stand comedy club at 30 Rock. Saw and heard it with my own eyes and ears, in fact.
How well has Gillis weathered that shitstorm surrounding the blurring of his comedic persona with his personal beliefs? His once-but-no-longer-secret Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast now boasts 14,224 patrons on Patreon, up 13 from when I checked just a couple of hours earlier this morning. Back on June 22, the time I’d checked previously, they had 12,855 Patreon patrons, each giving anywhere from $1 to $50 per month. They’d grown that several thousand since November 2020, when they barely pushed 9,000 patrons.
That’s not chump change. Those monthly Patreon subscribers give upward of $170,000 annually now to Gillis and his podcast partner, Matt McCusker.
That’s not counting whatever YouTube revenue Gillis rakes in with his sketch comedy partner on their Gilly and Keeves channel (135K+ subscribers).
And obviously not counting the live performance income Gillis has earned from gigs at The Stand in New York City or on the road, featuring for Dan Soder or headlining on his own.
Gillis lives in my actual neighborhood. But his income is far beyond my neighborhood. (cough cough insert subscribe to my Substack button, my brain tells me)
And his first stand-up special, released for free on YouTube on Tuesday morning, already had attracted more than 200,000 views in its first 24 hours. That’s a hit, baby!
Let’s stick a pin in this for now.
Because before we talk about Gillis and his first, unfiltered by anyone but himself, 48-minute presentation of his jokes (and what his choices may or may not say about his belief system versus what he believes he can sell to his audience, which can lead us into a much longer discussion), let’s take a look at how Gillis has reflected on his SNL FUBAR experience.
Two Septembers ago, when Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast returned for their first episode since blowing up, they disputed the notion that they could be “punching down” just because they’re straight white men. Which, OK. Having cousins myself from the poorer parts of Pennsylvania, watching their towns and their conditions deteriorate as I grew up, I’ve witnessed the class divide and how hard that cuts, as well as how it can bleed into fear and resentment toward people who don’t look like you.
At this time, Gillis was still trying to make sense of the whirlwind he’d just experienced. He knew that ranting against so-called woke comedians “all came from a place of insecurity,” because not that long before 2019, he was an open mic comedian from central Pennsylvania who moved to Philadelphia, saw comics doing better than him who he didn’t think deserved it, but then within a couple of years, he’d moved again, to NYC, gotten reps, and gotten into the top industry festivals such as Just For Laughs and Comedy Central’s Clusterfest. He obviously had the buzz and took advantage of his rising stardom to land and nail his SNL audition. But before getting SNL, he still felt like a broke loser, so punching anyone still felt like punching up to him.
Nevertheless, even in the immediate aftermath, Gillis had enough self-awareness to acknowledge embarrassment over his hastily-written, viral non-apology about how he was pushing boundaries with his comedy. “That shit’s corny.” And he certainly didn’t want the world to think he was an edgelord. “I’m not that guy,” he said in 2019. “That sucks…Give me an ounce of credit. Maybe this guy was funny enough to get SNL.”
From what I saw of him in person at Clusterfest 2019, and in his subsequent stand-up sets and online sketch videos, Gillis certainly wouldn’t have gone down in history as SNL’s worst hire. The calculus, whether you believe Lorne Michaels only wanted Gillis to appeal to rural conservative viewers, whether you think SNL always needs a stock stocky white guy to play the straight man in sketches, or whether you even thought Gillis could’ve mixed things up as a replacement for Alec Baldwin with his own Trump impersonation…it’s all moot now.
November 2019
Gillis went on Tim Dillon’s podcast (before Dillon went Hollywood and turned his podcast into a comedy-trolling phenomenon) and apologized for how the SNL situation went down. “I was fucking sorry about some things. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”
He also copped to knowing he’d said “way worse” on other podcast episodes that hadn’t resurfaced, said it was all inexcusable, “and then when I’m done apologizing for that, what could I do?”
Dillon’s reply at the time: “You cannot control how anyone takes a joke.”
Hmmm. That’s an interesting point. If you cannot control how the audience receives your joke, then what can the comedian control? Perhaps what jokes you deliver, and how you choose to deliver them? Nahhhhh. That’d be taking too much responsibility for one’s actions! 😉 jk lol /s
July 2021: The Joe Rogan Experience
“I get it. I said something fucked up. This is a corporation,” Gillis said of NBC. “Now if it wasn’t me, I’d probably be defending me.”
After Gillis sincerely apologizes again for those he did offend on that podcast, Rogan chimes in that he believes Gillis. Not only that, but also offers this advice to Gillis:
“Again, it’s a thing that people do. They’re just talking shit. It’s not real. It’s like you’re saying something inappropriate on purpose. And the only way you can do that is if the other person knows you’re not racist. That’s why it works. It works ‘cause you’re saying something that’s ridiculous and I’m like what the fuck is he saying?!”
So yeah, that obviously couldn’t have worked for Gillis when, at the time, as he said, “We’re doing a podcast for 500 people…That’s how many people listened to us.”
Now that he has more than 14,000 Patreon subscribers (and countless more who listen for free), Gillis has a sizeable audience who knows what to expect when they tune in, or click play to hear what he has to say.
But the two takeaways anyone in comedy (or out of comedy) should take away: 1) don’t say stupid stuff you don’t mean on podcasts because listeners will take it the wrong way, and 2) remember that sometimes the audience laughs at the inappropriate things you say for the wrong reason (see also: Chappelle’s Show, and why Dave Chappelle quit his Comedy Central deal).
Rogan, who earned multi-millions licensing his podcast to Spotify, also advised Gillis:“You also have to establish a relationship with your audience where they understand who you are. And then they know even if you say wild shit, you’re saying wild shit because you’re being silly.”
Gillis seemed to appreciate the fact that once your audience grows beyond a certain point, you’ll lose that relationship with everyone, and outsiders won’t know you the way your most loyal fans do.
Rogan’s reply? That’s OK. It’s worth it. “I would do this podcast exactly this way if I was just starting out and no one knew who I was and there was just 100 people listening.” Except for the fact that nobody would beg to go on your podcast if your audience shrank that much, but Rogan’s brain doesn’t work. That. Way.
So what should we make of Gillis after watching his first full stand-up special? Does it matter if many of us are still outsiders who haven’t truly heard much of his comedy?
Shane makes fun of his father for being a “FOX News Dad,” but then shows empathy for him and even appreciation, because he jokes that a dad that watches MSNBC isn’t masculine. And you wonder where the idea of toxic masculinity comes from, or how it gets perpetuated? Jokingly might be the worst way to perpetuate it, because then the outsider feels even less comfortable speaking out in opposition, for they, too, will be accused of a lack of machismo. Despite their mere opposition demonstrating its own manly courage. Gillis later calls his father “a good alcoholic,” because “he’s not hurting anybody.”
Gillis makes fun of the American South for its longstanding racism, and how the slow march to progress in civil rights only seemed to find a way once Southerners embraced black athletes and took ownership of that. Although that’s my own wording of what Gillis actually said — Gillis himself tags the joke by wondering if trans Americans also need to be great athletes to win over phobes and haters. Perhaps his joke about comparing racism to hunger and putting them both on a sliding scale might give us some insight into his actual beliefs? He certainly wants to let his audience on or off the hook this way.
He also lets his audience have it both ways on Trump, merely focusing on how funny Gillis found him to be. Regardless of his policies and how any of you may feel about them or they impacted your lives. “Undefeated in debates, and he never said a fact!” Gillis mused of the former president, of whom he also demonstrated he could impersonate, too.
All he really owns up to is feeling somehow stuck somewhere between his “white trash” uncles from central Pennsylvania and his new woke white friends who he calls “communists in Brooklyn.”
Well, that, and how he also has a face that he can reframe to look like he belongs in the Special Olympics.
There’s something about Gillis and his comedy that wouldn’t seem out of place at all during the 1980s comedy boom. Or the 1990s. Or even the 2000s. But in 2021, he sounds a bit behind the times.
What happens when the goalposts of morality move, and you don’t move with them? In comedy, you don’t always need to worry about that, because enough of the comedian’s audience remains just as slow as they are to awaken to the new reality. They all continue laughing as if times haven’t changed. Or laugh harder at the idea that times must change.
I keep going back to something Jim Jefferies said in his 2020 Netflix special, Intolerant, about how not everyone gets woke at the same speed, and how older people shouldn’t be expected to embrace increasingly progressive values as quickly as their children or grandchildren. It’s an astute point, and one to pin many a joke upon.
Gillis, however, is only 33. He should know better than his FOX News dad, who watches TV as long as it takes to absorb whatever angry propaganda he’s going to pass along in casual conversation. Does he know better than his father, though? I think so? I certainly hope so. But you wouldn’t be able to answer definitively yes or no after watching his special.
From The Comic's Comic 
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