The Joke’s on Everyone

By Abe Greenwald

It’s been a while since the left has completely lost its mind over a joke, but here we are again.   The right-friendly comedian Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live last weekend and made a joke about how women dress at the gym, and then showbiz liberals and leftists dutifully whined about it. 

Here’s the offending joke: “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now.”

I think this is largely a non-story about preachy celebrities on social media, but something is getting lost in the pointless left-right scrum that has ensued: The joke wasn’t very good. At least I didn’t think so, and my reason relates to the controversy that it stirred up.

I’ll make this brief because people quickly sound like fools when they start pontificating on what does or doesn’t constitute “true” comedy—especially people who aren’t comedians. 

My problem with the joke was that it felt as if it were written in part to provoke the exact reaction it got. You don’t go on TV and joke about women dressing like “whores” unless you’re looking to draw fire. The word is a grenade. 

Now here comes the pontificating: Comedy, contrary to what many believe, isn’t heightened by blunt provocation. In a performatively edgy joke, like Gillis’s, the humor and the incitement end up competing for your attention. Which is why I barely chuckled at his most inflammatory line. I’m not prissy, and I wasn’t offended. But I did feel kind of swindled because the joke teller was smuggling in a cultural argument—or perhaps a mere shock moment—while I was sitting in front of the TV just looking for laughs. 

The left knows only how to take offense, and Shane Gillis doesn’t owe anyone an apology. But it’s hard to say that a joke is “just a joke,” if it’s also something else: a deliberate taunt. This kind of dual-use comedy is standard on the left—and it’s ruined many great talents. Why look to make the problem total?  I don’t want to wind up with a comedy culture that forces me to choose between Bill Burrs and anti-Bill Burrs. 

Anyway, what can the left possibly accomplish with its social media finger-wagging these days? We are post–cancel culture (except, of course, when it comes to Jews and Israel, which is its own category). A few years ago, Gillis’s joke and the reaction to it would have sidelined him for quite a while. In fact, that already happened to him. SNL fired Gillis in 2019 after discovering that he had previously made gay and ethnic jokes on his own podcast. His appearance on SNL last Saturday—the third time he’s hosted the show since then—demonstrates how thoroughly the culture has shifted since peak woke.  

Donald Trump is back in the White House, and AOC is distancing herself from “woke 1” because she knows how most Americans feel about identity-driven leftism. A lot of conservatives don’t want to admit it, but the right came through Woke War I (mostly) triumphant. You don’t have to lob grenades from the stage. It’s safe just to do comedy again.  

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.