Watching Shane Gillis tickle himself to the point of being red in the face during his third “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig this past weekend, I’d wager that no one thinks Shane Gillis is funnier than Shane Gillis. But while that’s a pretty safe bet, his confidence in his own comedic stylings can’t get full credit for landing him where he’s at: appearances on a show he was fired from, Bud Light commercials where, as he points out, he “looked like a lesbian,” and a TV show about tires that 59% of critics hate and 91% of people who probably also think it’s funny to hear women called whores love.

No, we can thank everyone who, during the course of his 38 years on this earth, politely laughed at one of Gillis’ “Cornell 7‘s Big Book of Punchlines” zingers. And additional thanks to Lorne Michaels, who knows a ratings/headlines cow when he sees one, even if he doesn’t want to house him in his own barn at the end of the night.

Just as journalists worth their paychecks are taught to shy away from punching up headlines with puns or expletives because it’s lazy work, plenty of successful comedians refrain from desperately grasping for an easy laugh by calling women whores or punching down at their “big fat bit*h sisters,” as Gillis did in his monologue on Saturday night. Leanne Morgan has, to my knowledge, never joked about going to the gym and the men there being sluts for wearing sweatpants that show off their D and B’s, and she probably actually goes to the gym. Oh wait, Gillis did say in his monologue that he feels most comfortable working out in “his friend Joe Rogan‘s private gym.” Right. Riiiiiiiight.

Point being, happy, successful, confident, well-loved comedians are creative and secure enough to reach out and up for their material, not straight into their own asses. There’s a difference between being a “controversial” comic and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Dave Chappelle is equally awful, content-wise, but at least he’s good at being the absolute worst, if that can be a thing for the sake of this argument. Worth noting here that, even though he’s been in the game far longer than Gillis, Chappelle’s hosting number is only one larger than his . . . wonder why that is?

Gillis has made a career out of appealing to people chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol, and apparently there’s a home for that now on “SNL,” a show that’s lasted 51 years and counting by offering up a little something for everyone and carving out space for anyone — except for women, and people of color, and, more and more, viewers who haven’t been able to wear a red ball cap since 2017. Who’s laughing now? Not anyone I’d want to be next to on the treadmill.

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It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same. And so it goes, and here we are. Audiences just want to look in a mirror, even if they themselves internally despise what they see in that mirror. 

Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.”  We’re all paying the nauseating price now, and anyone who paved the way is complicit.

But “SNL” is a liberal show, you may be thinking. I mean . . . sure? But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. I’ll save you the Google. There’s more. 

In the wake of Gillis’ most recent hosting gig, it’s been refreshing to see men in the entertainment industry call him out. Michael Che, who started at “SNL” as a writer in 2013 and transitioned to an on-screen role as a “Weekend Update” co-anchor the following year, weighed in on Gillis’ monologue via a series of Instagram stories, writing, “Gotta do more press this week to promote the special . . . wonder what every f—ing questions gonna be about . . . thanks a lot, Shane.” “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy, son of “SCTV” alum Eugene Levy, also took to Instagram with a more direct and thoughtful approach, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”

But the most effective statement would be from Lorne Michaels, which he could make by honoring his first instinct to place Gillis in the persona non grata pile after clips from his podcast, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” showed him using racist and homophobic slurs, causing Gillis to be canned from the cast of “SNL” just days after his hiring was announced.  

I personally regret every time I put wind in the sails of a deeply unfunny and offensive man by politely laughing, feeling too awkward to course-correct the moment. Most women have these moments. I had one during my first job, when I was 15, and I laughed at the security guard twice my age who joked about his pants feeling tight after I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. I had one when I was driving with an old friend and didn’t give more than a “you gotta be careful with stuff like that” warning when he launched into a rant about how the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein “shouldn’t have been surprised” he acted the way he did. It’s hard to stand up in moments like these, but look what happens when we don’t. Shane Gillis is a cystic pimple. All the rest of it is the pus.

Lorne Michaels will likely invite Gillis back. The fact that I and countless other writers are typing out similar commentaries all but ensures it. But what he should be asking himself is whether the audience he’s going after with jokes like the ones Gillis made this past weekend is an audience he’d feel comfortable sitting in. That should matter. And more people should say something if it seems like it doesn’t.

The post Shane Gillis and the danger of laughing at unfunny men on “SNL” appeared first on Salon.com.

It wasn’t long after Braden Peters, better known as “Clavicular,” was arrested on suspicion of raping a 17-year-old girl at his family’s home in Massachusetts that his fellow MAGA influencers started complaining that he was the real victim. 

“Now we live in a climate where a 19-year-old can’t even sleep with a 16-year-old with a little alcohol involved. Absolutely insane,” said Nick Fuentes, the popular white nationalist podcaster, ignoring the fact that it has long been considered rape to have sex with someone unconscious and unable to consent, as alleged by the criminal complaint against Peters.  

Others floated conspiracy theories accusing the mysterious “they” of trying to “control” Clavicular, or claiming he is besieged with “women trying to ruin his life with rumors.” Brian Atlas of the “Whatever” podcast posted a video of the alleged victim drinking with Peters, as if it were exonerating evidence instead of bolstering the criminal case against him. Clavicular himself has been accusing the girl of fabricating her claims to get revenge for being rejected by him, an accusation echoed online by many of his fans. Right-wing commentator Richard Hanania, whose claims of reforming his racist views have drawn laudatory profiles in Vox and The Atlantic, struck out against the accuser, apparently because she didn’t cut off immediate contact with Peters after the alleged rape. (Research shows that victims often maintain contact with their assailants, especially if they’re still in denial or processing the trauma.) 

Such reactions are entirely predictable. MAGA hysteria over “cancel culture” has long provided an excuse to recast bigots as free speech martyrs on the specious grounds that being criticized for saying ugly things is a violation of their First Amendment rights. This was always pretzel logic, but the halos granted to the canceled by right-wingers has expanded beyond those who are mad because people yelled at them on social media. Actual crimes, especially violence against women, are now being excused and justified by redefining perpetrators as victims of cancel culture. As long as what you do makes progressives and feminists angry, it appears, there is no limit to how some on the right will protect and even canonize you. 

“MAGA and the right-wing have really lost the thread when it comes to their anger at cancel culture and are now just angrily fighting on the side of anyone who does like a crime,” Cody Johnston of “Some More News” noted in a recent episode. “Especially, it seems a crime against women.”

The Daily Wire, a right-wing production company founded by Ben Shapiro, openly brags how it hires actors and other talent shunned by mainstream Hollywood studios. “Thank you to the purple hairs. Please ‘cancel’ more creative geniuses,” a representative for the company said in a May 2025 press release that touted the hiring of former “Jeopardy!” producer Mike Richards as the new CEO. Richards had been slated to take over as host of “Jeopardy!” in 2021 — until The Ringer published an exposé containing accusations that he had been abusive toward female employees and “repeatedly used offensive language and disparaged women’s bodies” on his short-lived podcast. His hiring by The Daily Wire followed other prominent contracts between the outlet and canceled actors such as Gina Carano, who was fired from Disney after she equated liberals mocking her right-wing views to Nazis murdering Jews. 

The Daily Wire’s glorification of the canceled quickly expanded beyond those who had experienced consequences for hate speech, however. After coming aboard, Richards soon hired Jonathan Majors, who had been fired from the Marvel franchise years earlier, to star in an action film called “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” a movie reportedly so terrible that even critics struggled to take its vicious Islamophobia seriously. Unlike previous high-profile hires of canceled celebrities, though, Majors wasn’t just guilty of saying terrible things. He was convicted of domestic violence in 2024. 

As Johnston notes, MAGA leaders like Tesla CEO Elon Musk have also been championing “Citizen Vigilante,” an independently produced and intensely racist film starring Armie Hammer as a former Army officer on a killing spree against immigrants. Hammer has been accused by multiple women of sexual and emotional abuse, with at least one woman claiming he raped her. Although he has consistently denied the charges, he did admit in an interview with Air Mail in 2023 to having “used people.”

“They could have been happy to just be with me and would have said yes to things that maybe they wouldn’t have said yes to on their own,” he said. Hammer was dropped by his agency and lost acting jobs, and he now contends he had no idea “Citizen Vigilante” would be so “disgusting.”

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Even the right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who has twice been arrested on charges of rape and sex trafficking, has long benefited from the glow-up one gets in MAGA circles after claiming status as a victim of cancel culture. The laundry list of allegations against him grew so long that the Trump administration, after seeming to help him escape justice in Romania, finally acceded to the United Kingdom’s request to extradite him and his brother Tristan. Still, it took years before powerful people on the right finally started to inch away from the Tates. Their close relationship with MAGA influencers — and with Trump’s son Barron — have reportedly left the brothers with hope that the administration will intervene on their behalf. 

In retrospect, the shift from exalting those canceled for words to championing those canceled for alleged criminal behavior was inevitable. The First Amendment prevents government censorship, but one reason there are social penalties, including criticism, shunning and firing for hateful rhetoric, is that it is not, in fact, harmless. The discourse around so-called cancel culture has itself been warped, coming to imply that the problem is not bigoted language but liberal reactions to it. The insinuation is that such statements are “just words,” and to have any strong reaction to them is hysterical and overblown.

In fact, there is a direct line between misogynist rhetoric and violence against women. Men who listen to and repeat the idea that women exist to serve them — and should be punished if they reject that duty — are often likely to attempt to enforce that belief with violence. Degrading language aimed at women online often becomes the justification for vile behavior toward them in the real world. Creating social accountability for men who say misogynist things isn’t about feminists being overly sensitive; it’s about preventing those words from turning to action.

Clavicular’s arrest is a perfect example of this issue. He rose to fame as a “looksmaxxer,” which is a spin-off of the larger incel community. Incels believe that men are entitled to women’s sexual attention, and that feminism is an aberration because it allows women to live independently of men, instead of having to trade sex for survival. Looksmaxxers like Clavicular take it a step further, trying to game out strategies to reassert sexual dominance over women. Like Andrew Tate, a lot of the looksmaxxer discourse skirts the law by focusing on manipulating and tricking women into sex. But the implication of overt coercion is always bubbling beneath the surface. After all, if you feel that you are owed sex by women, rape becomes less like a crime and more like recompense. 

To be fair, conservatives aren’t the only ones who have fueled years of panic over “cancel culture.” The hysteria has normalized and promoted by centrist pundits in publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times, helping to obscure what should have been obvious: that bad words lead to bad actions.

Bigoted chatter online isn’t just trolling or trying to get a rise out of liberals. It’s dehumanizing actual people, and it makes violence against them easier to justify. By all accounts, Clavicular was enjoying his rising fame, engaging in laudatory interviews in popular venues like Barstool Sports and the “All In” podcast, outlet that treated his misogyny as mere theatrics. The rape charges against him should be a reminder to us all: Sometimes people actually act on their beliefs. 

The post Clavicular’s charges shows the real danger of MAGA manhood appeared first on Salon.com.