the comedian snl once fired over gay slurs hosted again and closed on "you're either gay or you're hitler." we'll take gay. obviously.

Photo: Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Saturday Night Live, Deadline and LateNighter

Let's do the bit properly, since he did not.

Shane Gillis has gone bald, he told the Saturday Night Live audience last night, "directly into an Adolf Hitler haircut." The front falls down when he gives speeches, and "there's no way to adjust it without looking exactly like..." He mimed the rest. Then the only other option: "I'm not going to do that. That's gay. That's it. You're either gay or you're Hitler. And isn't that where we're at as a country? Hey, that was the monologue, ladies and gentlemen."

That is the line everyone is quoting this morning, and it comes from SNL's own upload of the monologue, which carries human-made captions. So, for the record: the alternative to fascist hair is a guy who fixes his hair. We have been called worse things than "people who know what to do with a fringe."

who shane gillis is to snl

This was Gillis's third time hosting. The show hired him as a cast member in 2019 and fired him days later, after podcast clips resurfaced of him, in Deadline's words, "mocking Asian accents, in addition to using ethnic and gay slurs." Variety describes the same clips as "racist and homophobic remarks." SNL has now had him back to host three times.

the rest of the monologue

The gays showed up earlier, too, and honestly came off fine. Going to a public gym in New York as a fat guy is "a nightmare," he said, because "it's just the hottest gay guys you've ever seen. They're jacked and they look at me like, 'Yeah, right. I know, dude.'" Deadline says he put on "his best femme voice" for that part. The very next line was that women at the gym "dressed like whores now," which is the joke critics singled out. He also said that in his Bud Light ads he looked "like a lesbian," and that his friend Joe Rogan has a private gym and sauna in Texas, where Theo Von told him he looked like "a gas station egg."

The reviews were not kind. LateNighter called the closer a "super-crappy false equivalency" and Gillis a "rightly fired-for-cause almost cast member." Variety's headline said he bombed, again. Deadline's review said the night's real bright spot was new cast member Grace Reiter.

Look, it is a hairline joke, and it is about as dangerous as a hairline. But if a man who got fired over slurs needs a binary to end his act, and one side of it is Hitler, we are flattered to be the other side. Gay it is. Sweep it to the left, babe.