MAGA's Funniest Foot Soldier

Shane Gillis is as dangerous as he is hilarious.

Photo courtesy of the Albany Theater.

The “Uncle Danny” bit wasn’t the first time I heard of Shane Gillis—that honor goes to when, in 2019, he was hired and subsequently fired from SNL before the season even began. But it was what made me a fan. If you don’t belong to my demographic (18-29, male, the sort of person who deleted TikTok just to get hooked on YouTube Shorts), let me try and summarize: “I said ‘retarded’ there a couple times,” Gillis opens, addressing the audience of his 2023 Netflix special Beautiful Dogs. “My bad.” A pause for laughs. “I don’t know if you can tell by looking at me, [but] I do have family members with Down Syndrome.” He gestures at his face, his demeanor. “I dodged it, but it nicked me!” He pantomimes a boxer’s duck.

What follows is a lengthy digression about how dudes with Down Syndrome are the happiest people alive (they love two things: John Cena, and tits), peppered with stories about Gillis’s Uncle Danny. Danny, in Gillis’s telling, loves grilled cheese sandwiches so much that he sneaks them into restaurants, just in case they’re not on the menu. “Where are you hiding those cheeeese, Danny?” says Gillis, impersonating Danny’s father. “He’s been making them at night…” In the nearly two years since Beautiful Dogs dropped, references to Uncle Danny have proliferated in the comments sections of seemingly-unrelated YouTube videos and Instagram posts. The lines have become a calling card for a certain sort of suddenly-resurgent, online- native bro-y-ness. A badge of baby’s first steps into the Zynternet.

On the surface, Gillis’s joke follows a tried and true pattern for conservative-ish comedians. Step 1: Open with an abrupt, borderline controversial observation, something tastefully toeing the line between “white people be like…” and actually racist. Step 2: Pause, eyebrows raised, while the audience nervously chuckles. Step 3: Spin into a lengthy anecdote about a friend or family member of said race/sexual orientation/disability, something warm and specific enough to make it clear that, “offensive” jokes aside, you have a genuine relationship with people of the group in question. Step 4: Right when you’ve built up enough credibility that people in the audience are questioning whether your jokes were in bad taste at all, pull the rug out from under them. Pick a punch line that drives home stereotypes and then some. The crowd will go wild.

This move is surely as old as stand-up comedy. It’s part crowd work, part “will he/won’t he” tension building, and part middle finger to the face of the “you can’t say that!” crowd. Though the writing is lazy, it’s undeniably effective. It’s why, despite being the greatest stand-up comic alive or dead, Dave Chapelle has spent the past decade touring hour-long sets that, without fail, involve a version of “you know, I have nothing against trans people. Buuuttt….” In the streaming era, bad press—the sort that Netflix and HBO-backed comics can expect when they include a tasteless joke in their specials—isn’t just better than no press, it’s better than good press, too. That’s why every show you see advertised these days is called some variation of the “You Can’t Cancel Me” tour. The culture wars sell.

But there’s something different about Gillis. Maybe it’s that his comedy comes from somewhere more personal, and therefore more empathetic, than his contemporaries’. Or maybe it’s just that any morals and principles I once held have finally been fried away from the heinous shit I see on the internet every day. But even his supposed-edgy jokes feel like they have an undeniable human heart. Against the odds, his jokes about Down syndrome feel sweet.

It’s a peculiar disconnect. Gillis crossed over into mainstream visibility after a decade plus on the comedy podcast circuit. Much of his online footprint is more in line with scare-quote “media personalities” like Joe Rogan or Stavros Halkias than the touring stand up of the 2010s. It was these podcasts (clips surfaced of him saying “chink” and other slurs on-air) that got Gillis into hot water with SNL. Yet while that didn’t fly in 2019, now—with Trump reelected, Post Malone gone country, and the vibe thoroughly shifted—Gillis is ascendent. On the surface, the fact that Gillis is unabashedly conservative is, frankly, a little refreshing. After a decade of uptight acts whose stars peddled Comedy-As-Talk-Show-Audition (John Mulaney, Trevor Noah), or Comedy-As-HBO-Miniseries (Ramy Youssef, Aziz Ansari), seeing someone get up there and talk shit like the Stand Up-Gods intended seemed worth handwaving some offensive tweets. His recent spot MCing the ESPYs—which went viral online for causing more than a few industry bigwigs in the audience to shake their heads—is the perfect example. Even when the jokes (knowingly) ride the line of tastelessness, Gillis’s willingness to go there is impressive in of itself.

An important distinction, at least when Gillis was coming up, was that he wasn’t as entrenched in the MAGA-verse as some of his frequent collaborators (Tony Hinchcliffe, better known as the comic who called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” at a Trump rally, chief among them). The consequence: no one really seemed to know what to do with him. Liberal magazines tried to expound on the character he played—caricaturing a particular strain of washed-up frattyness—while conservatives see themselves in, and celebrate, the same. The way that fans and critics alike struggled to put Gillis in a political (read: culture war) box was interesting. More importantly, it’s funny.

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In 2019, I left my hometown of Albany, New York for college; by the time I graduated and moved back, it had become a hotspot for comedy. Lately, the tour dates for many medium-sized, working comics have tended towards a predictable rotation of small, Northeast cities: Albany, Hartford, Providence, Springfield. I imagine these are the sorts of places where, at least in the minds of booking managers, crowds are a little more crass than the major cities. They represent an opportunity to iron out the kinks in one’s act, just far-out enough to avoid the scrutiny of downtown Comedy Cellar scenes, but also close enough to drive back to New York and sleep in one’s own bed after a stinker. This is all to say that earlier this Spring, when I learn Gillis is performing in Albany, I’m not too surprised. What does catch me off guard is finding out that he sold out the MVP Arena, a venue with capacity for 17,000 people.

Albany, NY.

The day before the show, I buy two tickets—mercifully not too overpriced—for my girlfriend, Ellen, and I. Ellen is a self-professed hater of stand-up comedy in general, and Shane Gillis in particular. I bring her along for research. Together, we watch the crowd flow into the arena on the patio of Albany’s City Beer Hall. Lifted pickups, Bass Pro Shop hats, and discarded cans of Bud Light with shotgun holes keyed in their sides were everywhere. (Thank you, Shane Gillis Super Bowl LIX commercial for absolving Bud Light of its woke allegations.)

Ellen and I glance at each other. Albany isn’t exactly the most cosmopolitan city imaginable–in fact, that’s one of its charms–but the crowd that’s gathering for Gillis is a far cry from the tired-looking lawyers and state workers I see downtown everyday. More Boot Barn than Banana Republic. Surely some of these people have trekked in from Columbia County or other such boonies just for the show. I also get the impression that many of the Pitt Viper-wearing pedestrians are, if not faking it, then certainly leaning into the rednecky atmosphere. Suburban kids embracing their recently re-granted permission to pretend to be country.