A joke making the rounds when we called cancel culture “political correctness” went like this: Q: “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” A: “That’s not funny.”
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People, or at least some people, laughed because it contained a grain of truth through a caricature of the humorless puritans increasingly populating the faculties of women’s studies departments. It was meant to provoke laughter and not predict the future.
Alas, here we are, living in the punchline.
Shane Gillis, in the wake of this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live monologue in which he joked about women’s immodest gym apparel, received a “that’s not funny” response from people oblivious to their becoming the punchline when they joke-police punchlines. (RELATED: The People Who Once Laughed With John Cleese Are Now His Punchlines)
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long,” Gillis joked. “I didn’t know women just dress like whores now.”
One could hear the gasps not through the TV set but on the internet (meeting place for the perpetually aggrieved).
“I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television,” a squinty, scolding, schoolmarmish Dan Levy announced to the internet. “And to be perfectly honest, more men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it’s complacency that has created the environment with which women are sexually assaulted.” Eugene Levy’s humorless son concluded with the description of women as “superior human beings to men,” a word that begins in “f,” and a condescending, frowny-faced stare.
No, their anger is no longer enough — and that’s the primary source of their anger.
The outrage spread. Swifties wondered why their heroine’s husband “liked” Gillis’s monologue on Instagram — and why Taylor Swift did not distance herself from him. Flavor Flav, or whoever oversees his social media, described Levy’s post as “important allyship.” A USA Today headline read: “Shane Gillis degraded women on ‘SNL.’ We aren’t angry enough.”
No, their anger is no longer enough — and that’s the primary source of their anger. Seven years ago, progressive anger at comedy (normal people laugh at it rather than scowl) drove Gillis from the cast of Saturday Night Live before he appeared in a single sketch. Gillis’s remarkable comeback proved that Emperor Woke has no clothes. The anger stems not so much from Gillis’s observations about gyms but from the fact that these people tried to kill his career seven years ago and they only made him stronger.
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How strong?
Gillis entered the Guinness Book of World Records three months ago by selling 76,946 tickets to a stand-up show at the stadium where the Philadelphia Eagles play. Richard Pryor? Eddie Murphy? Andrew Dice Clay? No comedian in history has ever come close to selling out a football stadium. And Gillis did it after the progressives supposedly ended his career.
He pitches Bud Light on commercials with Peyton Manning and Post Malone. He plays an employee at an automotive repair shop in the successful Netflix show Tires. He hosted the ESPY Awards last year. He appears as a playable character in EA Sports College Football 25. And, to the despair of the people who banished him from the Not Ready for Primetime Players, he has hosted three episodes of Saturday Night Live since his firing.
They lost. Shane Gillis won. It turns out the same people who cannot take a joke cannot take losing.
The less obvious point occurs not on this macro level but on the micro level. The butt of Gillis’s ongoing routine about gyms was not women but Shane Gillis. Shane Gillis body-shamed Shane Gillis. The quip about women dressing like whores to work out came as a small part of a long monologue in which he confesses to hitting “fat rock bottom,” his friends describe him as resembling a “gas-station egg,” and his sister calls him “b—h hips.” The fixation on a couple of lines in a bit that went on for five minutes or so speaks to a level of narcissism normally reserved for psychopaths and politicians.
“For one vital element of humor is inequality — and striking visual, aural, and physical differences,” Paul Johnson wrote in one of his last books, Humorists. “Differences in sex, age, color, race, religion, physical ability, and strength lie at the source of probably the majority of jokes since the beginning of human self-consciousness.”
Unstated? The ability to take a joke immediately breaks down any superficial barrier to friendship, and the inability to take one necessarily provokes more laughter. When some authority figure, real or imagined (principal, policeman, priest, progressive), says “that’s not funny,” it only makes it funnier. Any 6th grader told to stop laughing could tell you that.
People like Shane Gillis because they like someone who can take a joke — and tell one. They do not like Shane Gillis’s critics because whiny, intolerant people who see every football huddle as 11 guys whispering about them and hear every joke as a personal attack wish to make the rest of us as joyless as them.
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