The Joker and the Woke

Daryl McCann I 9 March 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Shane Gillis is currently one of the most popular and successful stand-up comedians in America, and that fact alone is driving the woke crowd crazy. Perhaps not as crazy as the recent surge in the polls for Donald Trump is making them but crazy enough. To compound their distress, Gillis – or the ‘controversial Gillis’ as the mainstream media invariably refer to him – was invited to host NBC’s Saturday Night Live a few weeks back, the very show that ‘cancelled’ Gillis in 2019 as a response to pressure from America’s Rainbow Guards.

Does the appearance of Shane Gillis on mainstream television signify the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of America’s very own cultural revolution? Quite possibly. In 1978, Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping, hoping to save his communist regime from being swept into the dustbin of history, halted the madness of China’s cultural revolution with a policy called ‘eliminating chaos and returning to normal’.

Certainly, the 36-year-old Gillis is, in the PC sense, ‘normal’ – a white, Catholic, heterosexual male raised by conservative-leaning parents in ‘fly-over America’, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He often describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as looking like a high school football coach. His celebrity is not the celebrity of Hollywood, and yet he is no less a celebrity for that.

The Shane Gillis: Live in Austin (2021) special has been viewed online by some 24 million people, while his Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast remains the most subscribed podcast on Patreon. At the start of March, he performed three sell-out shows at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall. We are not exactly talking Taylor Swift drawing power but when he tours Australia later this year, he will fill vast arenas. The audience is not going to be teenage girls and failing (or should we say flailing) prime ministers, and yet the crowds will be no less enthusiastic.

The inference some will draw – do draw – from the rise and rise of Shane Gillis is that he is an alt-right figure catering for young, white male ‘deplorables’. Pertinently, Swift, for a time, received not dissimilar opprobrium, although she solved that problem by becoming a vocal supporter for Old Joe. Indeed, Democratic strategists are hopeful Swift’s endorsement might swing the November election in their favour. After all, it is permissible, as everyone including the talented Taylor Swift knows, for an American celebrity to be political – so long as you choose the right side, which is to say the left side.

It has been a trickier business for Gillis to escape the ‘white supremacist’ tag, and not just because as a male he cannot play the feminist card. In 2019, after NBC’s Saturday Night Live announced Gillis would be joining the show as a regular, an investigative journalist did a deep dive into past Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast programs and discovered Gillis using derogatory language to describe Chinese people, albeit in the adopted dramatic persona of an American official circa 1940. Other indiscretions were unearthed, including the casual employment of gay as a mild pejorative.

SNL at the time went into damage control and demanded a full public apology from their new hire. Gillis, doubtless to the surprise of NBC, parsed his words very carefully: ‘I’m happy to apologise to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said. My intention is never to hurt anyone, but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.’ Such a tepid apology was never going to satisfy social justice warriors out for his scalp (if I may use that allusion). Gillis subsequently earned the dubious honour of being the first cast member of SNL to be fired without ever appearing on the show.

Gillis insists he has never voted for Trump but, to the chagrin of his critics, adds that it would be perfectly understandable if his Fox News-watching dad did. To think otherwise would not be ‘inclusive’. Moreover, Gillis’ skit on SNL, ‘White Men Can Trump’, skewers Trump’s braggadocio only to ‘spoil’ the sketch by introducing a Joe Biden impersonator who immediately trips over himself. Equating Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler is perfectly fine, but mocking Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive infirmity, as Jon Stewart discovered in his recent return to The Daily Show, is not to be encouraged.

What to make, then, of the appearance of ‘controversial Shane Gillis’ on SNL, the gatekeeper of American taboos? Firstly, and these things are in the eye of the beholder, of course, it was funny. But you be your own judge of that. Doubtless, I am biased, given that Gillis is a friend of my son, James McCann, also a stand-up comedian and occasional Speccie writer. For fans of Gillis, his turn on SNL was a triumph, not least because he stayed true to his usual stand-up material, notwithstanding the absence of swearing.

On the other hand, for progressive ideologues like Marie Myung-Ok Lee, who wrote ‘SNL Firing Shane Gillis Isn’t Enough’ back in 2019, the showcasing of Gillis on national television is about ‘maintaining the current white power structure’. According to Dean Obeidallah, writing for CNN, Gillis hosting SNL was proof ‘bigotry sells’. Many mainstream media outlets, perhaps heeding Mao’s advice to put politics before art, were quick to claim Gillis had ‘bombed’ on SNL.

The real triumph of Shane Gillis’s hosting of SNL, perhaps, was the extensive referencing of his niece with Down Syndrome in the opening monologue. Gillis and his family, to provide some context, founded a café that is waited upon by people with Down syndrome. For the clueless Michael Boyle, of Daily Beast fame, Gillis ‘bombed’ – what else? – when he tried to make fun of the handicapped (or is it handi-abled?) with jokes about the service at the family’s café: ‘It’s going exactly how you think it would go. Everyone’s getting apple juice. We don’t know how to fix that problem.’

Yes, you might interpret Gillis’ joke as a cruel put-down or, instead, you could interpret the loving and humorous commentary about his niece and the café as a powerful statement on the full humanity of those with Down syndrome – more, as an admonition against abortion on the grounds of Down syndrome.

It is comedic moments like this that, if nothing else, remind me of how much America’s cultural revolution has sucked the life out of everything.

Author: Daryl McCann