The monologue

Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live on Saturday, 10 October, his third time as host, and his seven-minute opening monologue was made up mostly of self-deprecating jokes about his appearance and weight. One bit was about going to the gym. Gillis said he had not been in so long that he did not know women dressed the way they do now, then described the neon shorts women wear as 'artificial bait-colored' and told the audience not to look because 'they are filming'. The New York Times reported that the line drew laughs and groans from the studio audience. Gillis also joked about his friends Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who had ribbed him about his looks, and said he had 'balded directly into an Adolf Hitler haircut'.

Gillis was announced in 2019 as part of a new group of SNL cast members, alongside Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman, but he was fired before his debut over resurfaced clips of anti-Asian slurs and homophobic jokes. He apologized at the time, describing himself as a comedian who pushes boundaries but sometimes misses. He returned to host SNL in 2024 and again in 2025, and his 10 October appearance was his third. Lorne Michaels, the show's creator, told The Wall Street Journal in 2019 that Gillis 'said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world', and he said the decision to fire Gillis came from NBC executives.

Dan Levy's response

Schitt's Creek co-creator and star Dan Levy posted an Instagram reel on Sunday, 11 October, in which he said that women wearing short shorts at the gym do not make them whores, and that the men calling them that are misogynists. He added that he had seen more men's nipples at the gym than he had ever seen women showing their bodies off. Levy then said of the monologue:

“I'm speechless that something like that can exist on live national television.”

Levy argued that more men need to stand up against it, because complacency has created an environment in which women are sexually assaulted, and he called such material a conversation rather than a crime. He also said that men need to defend women more, that this is an everybody issue rather than a women's issue, and that men who objectify women in the media teach other men to treat women as objects.

Ego Nwodim's gym photo

Ego Nwodim, a former SNL cast member, responded on Monday, 12 October, by posting a photo of herself at the gym on her Instagram Story with a caption that echoed Gillis's insult. She followed it with a photo of her post-workout meal, with a caption that continued the joke. Nwodim joined SNL in 2018 and stayed for seven seasons, and she left the show ahead of the current Season 51.

Wider reaction

An Independent commentary noted that the material was especially tone-deaf given the Cornell 7 case, the 2024 gang rape allegations involving seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University, which SNL had addressed during Weekend Update the week before. A Hollywood Reporter column argued that the joke was not built for the SNL audience in 2026, and that the show's writers and cast are generally a diverse group of Gen Z comedians who came up in improv, sketch and stand-up. A separate Independent column called the joke boring and said it failed both as a joke about the audience and as comedy. Gillis also apologized after accidentally saying the f-word during a Dr. Seuss-inspired sketch in the same episode. In response to the criticism of the gym joke, he said he pushes boundaries and takes risks, and he said he was sorry to anyone who was offended.