Reaction Shots: Shane Gillis is Funny. Hasan Minhaj is Not
Two comedians and a New Yorker walk into a bar.
How Shane Gillis Survived
The career arc of Shane Gillis has never stopped short of being fascinating. When we first heard of him, he was hired by Saturday Night Live as one of their new cast members, before getting fired over insensitive jokes about Asian people on a podcast. Now, he is selling out shows, is a frequent guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and scored his first Netflix special called “Beautiful Dogs.” It is funny, and in the special, Shane Gillis can deliver a joke so awkward, that it’s seamless. It also shows that the best way to return from being cancelled is to take the moderate path in the firestorm; mainly to keep stirring up the pot, but move on from the aftermath altogether and focus on honing your skills as an entertainer.
If there is ever a beautiful rebuke to cancel culture and its adherents than being the top comedian on Netflix’s algorithm, I can’t think of anything else. Critics who were gloating about Gillis’s cancellation, are otherwise silent about Gillis’s emergence as one of the biggest comedians working today. When it happened, op-eds and long-form essays were running it as proof that either the concept lives rent-free in the minds of people who are secretly bigoted, or that it does exist and is good.
Yet nothing screams cancellation more than Mike Ryan, a staff writer for Uproxx whose beat is covering Saturday Night Live, calling for his firing. Before that, upon hours of announcing that Gillis was going to debut alongside Bowen Yang - a man known for putting his identity as a gay Chinese Australian-American comedian upfront - Seth Simons, a freelance comedy critic (yes, those exist), chimp-clipped his podcast where he spoke about encountering Chinese people in Philadephia’s Chinatown. This caused an uproar among the media class, Asian-American activists, who will throw tomatoes at anybody who are willing to defend either Gillis as a person or his comedy. (Andrew Yang, who ran as a Democratic Presidential Candidate, wanted to have an open discussion with him. It has never gone public.)
After he got fired, critics of Gillis were wish casting on his politics. Will he shake hands with The Daily Wire, now that they are expanding their horizons from political commentary to entertainment? Or will he retweet what a lunatic Elon Musk is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to appease those people? What Gillis did was the opposite of their masturbatory fantasies. He didn’t sign a contract with The Blaze, but he spent years touring in smaller venues and frequently appearing on the comedic podcast circuit, earning more pockets in his Patreon and releasing his first special Live in Austin for free on YouTube.
He got further attention in 2022 when Kelefa Sanneh profiled him in The New Yorker and later appeared on Joe Rogan. Say whatever you will about Rogan, but his platform will focus on getting the best out of comedians, especially the ones with Gillis’s style. Sanneh’s profile is perhaps the first to approach his style seriously because Gillis is not that straightforward. When Judd Apatow was asked to comment on this controversy, he couldn’t fathom whether or not his humour was sincere.
I think that’s why he was an easy target in September 2019 when he was fired from SNL. When the entertainment wing of journalism first heard of this guy, it did not match the kind you’ll find during pre-Elon Twitter, where cultural institutions and their audiences pat themselves on the back for believing in the right things. Gillis was a more minor act that did not belong to that realm of self-congratulations and cheap political point-scoring. These people don’t like Trump, they think Hannah Gasdby is the saviour of comedy and that the punching down/up dichotomy is a valid approach in assessing the form. When it was announced that Bowen Yang would be included in SNL’s cast, they loved it because he made a lot of sense and passed their criteria with flying colours. Meanwhile, Gillis can pull a pretty good Trump impersonation and continues to use the word ‘gay’ more casually than in the podcast he was once known for. This may endear him to anti-woke fans, but doesn’t make him the most dogmatic person in the room.
Gillis never strikes me as a right-wing personality (which is what The New York Times thinks), and he’s aware that he shouldn’t be one. Part of the reason why right-wing comedy fails to be funny (at least for me), is for the exact reason that its ideological competitors fall behind as well.
Since his firing, a lot of his critics have moved on as well and not noticing. Ryan, who joined the bandwagon, has not posted anything about Gillis. On the other hand, Simons got so annoyed by his emergence that it’s part and parcel of his beat of being the comedy hall monitor, having pieces published in certain places about the form flirting with the ‘far-right’. Their objective to banish him from polite society was a failure, but their lack of care reveals his ignorance of getting much bigger.
Gillis’s jokes throughout his Netflix special have been quite mild thus far. The most controversial thing Beautiful Dogs has approached is a Sky News Australia article claiming that Australian fans were offended by his backhanded jokes about their nation. “It’s just a whole country doing nothing,” he says. “That’s what I like about them. They’re just down there – zero exports, creating nothing.” Gillis says that some of them are gay, and the most famous that Australia got is someone punching a kangaroo (and losing). Had this been another anti-woke type, they would have said something about COVID or lockdowns, even if it was two years ago. While his audience is becoming broader, it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody will be on board.
But more importantly, for as much as cancel culture is excruciating to discuss or as painful to experience if you ever want to make it big, the solution to it is to move on. I think this is what Gillis did. The jokes that got him cancelled are about what Gillis is starting, rather than an overarching personality that leads to partisanship. Some people who have faced a mob have capitalised on that situation by doubling as a provocateur through alternative platforms. It took so many years for Gillis to become focused, that the world’s biggest streaming service finally took notice. Should it be as cutting-edge as he was once known? Probably, but I think that’s a trade-off that most artists would have to oblige with.
Upon his firing, Gillis tweeted that he’s a comedian who pushes boundaries, a sentiment that seems pretty ordinary for anyone who has a taste to come. But in his first appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, he says this:
“I don’t want to be a victim—I want to be a comedian [...]. So I don’t want to come on and do stuff where I’m, like, ‘Yeah, it was unfair how I was treated.’ It’s like, no, I get it—I understand why I was treated that way. I said wild shit. I’m going to keep saying wild shit.”
This is what he wants, and for that, he’s having a damn good time doing it.
The Third Worst Hasan
The New Yorker had a salacious piece about Hasan Minhaj, running to be the finalist for The Daily Show’s new host and Trevor Noah’s replacement. Minhaj, formerly the host of Netflix’s Patriot Act, is accused of fabricating the stories he told during his standups and interviews. These involved being played by a white girl during high school, that his daughter was rushed to the hospital because he suspected the white powder given was anthrax and being arrested by the police over a prank he did with ‘Brother Eric’. None of these stories happened, and the piece makes it clear that there were consequences. The people implicated - from the white girl to Brother Eric to the hospital - say that they are all lies.
You can either read The New Yorker’s profile on Minhaj in two ways: either it has lost grasp on the basic concept of humour, which is that a comedian would go to great lengths to exaggerate a story for comedic effect, thus they are cancelling him. Or that Minhaj uses these stories, not just to achieve that goal, but to score cheap political points during an era when you could do that because Donald Trump is President. These stories target one very specific goal: to prove that America is bigoted towards Minhaj and the Muslim population as a whole. He is interested in telling jokes as if they are short fiction published in Granta and makes his audience feel guilty about it. That, according to Minhaj, was the point.
Following the piece, there’s a write-up in Uproxx about whether the audience can catch up with the comedian. What the author misses is that this is another comedian using the political moment to lift himself to the comedic ranks and using it in the most sociopathic way imaginable. That should be the lesson for all comedic critics and consumers, but they’ve lowered any standard of discernment, and someone like Minhaj can still score big work.
You Must Read This: How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson by Jon Askonas
Jon Stewart’s most famous moment was also Tucker’s most notorious. When Tucker Carlson was previously the bow-tied-wearing host for CNN’s Crossfire, Stewart dared to say that he is everything wrong with America. Needless to say, Carlson had the last laugh, being more prominent in recent times compared to Stewart, while he stayed in the wilderness hosting a show on Apple TV. That’s the premise of a piece from 2022 by Jon Askonas for The New Atlantis, which is a wide overview of the news media in the early days of the 20th century that captured the frustrated mood of viewers and enabled people like Stewart to carry the news that old fashioned newsreaders couldn’t. Stewart took advantage of it during that moment, and Carlson has been doing the same thing. Now fired from his coveted timeslot at Fox News, he is maintaining his relevance on Twitter/X and has descended into a mindless demagogue.