No one is saying that it’s easy to be a crowd-pleasing comic. Finding that line can be brutal. Taking no risks makes you boring, taking too many will have you in the internet’s crosshairs. That’s not really a career ender these days, but it’s still not enjoyable.
Shane Gillis is someone who steps into controversy relatively often; he got fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for making racist and sexist jokes, and his vein of humor can sometimes be edgelord adjacent. I’m sure if more people watched Tires on Netflix, they’d be angry about it.
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Gillis is still popular — he’s got the Netflix show, he’s a semi-regular host of SNL despite his firing, and this week he was the host of the ESPYs. His performance, both to the room of highly lauded athletes up for awards and the nation, caused a few dustups. (They were actually funny though.) The Cut said his WNBA jokes were tired and sexist. Countless articles called his monologue divisive or controversial. His Jeffrey Epstein and January 6th jokes didn’t land in a room with a lot of millionaires, even if they were a hit online.
The ladies at The View gave Gillis a mixture of praise and criticism about all of it, each with their own take on his overall performance. But Joy Behar cut into Gillis for one thing that’s easy to be against, regardless of how you feel about the jokes. “He said, ‘I didn’t write that joke.’ Never do that,” Behar said about Gillis. “Johnny Carson was on the air for, I don’t know, 100 years? Never once did he say, ‘The writer wrote that bad joke that I just bombed with.’ That’s bad form. That’s a mistake.”
It’s actually something The View also discussed back when Jo Koy hosted the Golden Globes. In that instance, Whoopi Goldberg and Sarah Haines were actually supportive of Koy’s performance and distancing himself from the writers’ jokes.
But I agree with Behar. I think Gillis has a long way to go in the distance from being a good comedian to being able to work a room like the ESPYs. Content aside, he seemed nervous. Hedging jokes with “I didn’t write that one,” isn’t going to make it seem less bad that you’re saying whatever you’re saying. To borrow some of Gillis’ verbiage, it’s just going to make you look like a pussy. Even if the ESPYs joke writers were a team of people Gillis had no say in working with, he’s getting paid to perform — there are a million checkpoints before the stage where he could have intervened if thought a joke sucked.
There’s a lesson to be learned here for all future awards show hosts: You’re going to bomb. The bit will land in the room, but it won’t land online, or vice versa. Own that. When a joke sucks, it’s the host’s job to take it on the chin. Not much can actually ruin a comedy career — look at Louis C.K. He spent more than a decade whipping out his junk, and he’s still headlining the New York Comedy Festival.
Everyone understands a bad joke. It’s much harder to sympathize with being a coward.