Saturday Night Live UK lays into Shane Gillis
In his SNL monologue last week, Shane Gillis said women at the gym looked like whores. (Chris Pizzello / The Associated Press files)
Shane Gillis is not off the hook yet.
A week after the comedian hosted Saturday Night Live, where he called women “whores” for wearing shorts to the gym and used an expletive during a sketch, the show’s British counterpart, Saturday Night Live UK, took aim at him.
During the show’s Weekend Update segment, cast member Ania Magliano referred to a news story in which women at an Oktoberfest event in Munich were given cycling shorts before getting on a carnival ride. If the shorts protected the women from being “up-skirted,” Magliano said, they were now vulnerable to “something much worse.” A picture of Gillis flashed on the screen.
Magliano continued: “Last week on SNL, comedian Shane Gillis also caused controversy by dropping the f-bomb. Oh, Shane, you’re not allowed to say that, you stupid ...” She finished her sentence with a pair of expletives.
Saturday Night Live UK is allowed to broadcast swear words because it airs after 9 p.m.
The British spinoff, which debuted in March, largely mirrors its U.S. predecessor. It began its second season last month, and new episodes are available Sundays in Canada on Crave. Lorne Michaels is the executive producer of both shows.
A representative for Michaels did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
In the early hours of Oct. 11, as Gillis said goodbye during the curtain call of Saturday Night Live, he apologized for having used an expletive earlier in the broadcast, but many fans of the show and fellow celebrities quickly condemned his appearance.
In a video posted to Instagram last week, actor Dan Levy said: “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.” Levy added that he was speechless that such comments could be made on live national television.
Many celebrities, including Viola Davis, Elizabeth Banks and Sarah Michelle Gellar, publicly supported Levy’s remarks.
Comedian Phoebe Robinson asked in her own post on social media: “Aren’t we sick of this misogynistic, lazy ass, hack, mediocre, straight, male (expletive) disdain for women” that’s masked as comedy?
Michael Che, a co-host of the Weekend Update segment in New York, told the Today show: “That’s comedy. You think it’s funny, and then some people don’t.” He later issued a statement on Instagram saying that he did not laugh at Gillis’s monologue jokes. “Even if it looks like I’m laughing, I’m not really laughing,” he said. “I’m just being polite.”
Gillis also hosted SNL in 2024 and 2025. He was hired as a featured performer on SNL in 2019 but was fired from the program days later after offensive remarks he had made, including about Chinese people, surfaced.
— New York Times