Shane Gillis returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend for his third hosting appearance. Apparently, he still believes insulting women is a reliable way to get a laugh from the audience.

Gillis hosted the October 10 episode with Rosalía as musical guest. During his opening monologue, he discussed his attempts to lose weight, his discomfort around attractive people and his recent return to the gym. Then he turned to women in workout clothes.

“Also, I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?”

Gillis kept going, describing women’s shorts, their bodies and how uncomfortable he felt looking at them. Later in the episode, he accidentally dropped an uncensored F-bomb during a Dr. Seuss-inspired sketch.

Variety reported on October 11 that Gillis struggled through a monologue featuring jokes about women, gay men and his own appearance, noting that several landed with little laughter. Entertainment Weekly confirmed the accidental swear during the Green Eggs and Ham sketch, which prompted an improvised response from cast member Mikey Day.

I have a question. Why is a woman wearing shorts to exercise still comedy material in 2026? Seriously. We have artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and billionaires trying to colonise space. And somehow we are still debating whether women’s gym clothes are sufficiently modest.

The Joke Wasn’t Clever

Gillis opened by explaining that returning to a public gym felt intimidating. Fair enough. Gyms can be intimidating, especially after a long absence when everyone else seems to know exactly what they are doing.

There is plenty of comedy in that. The confusing machines. The people who somehow look immaculate after an hour of exercise. The increasingly elaborate outfits people wear to film fitness content.

Instead, Gillis decided women in fitted shorts deserved to be called whores. That is where the joke becomes tired. Women wear shorts to the gym because they are exercising. They are sweating, running and lifting weights. Some prefer loose clothing. Others prefer fitted clothing. Neither choice tells us anything meaningful about their sexual behaviour.

Yet women’s bodies remain an apparently endless source of public commentary. Meanwhile, men routinely exercise shirtless. Nobody seems particularly concerned that their clothing choices signal a moral crisis.

SNL Keeps Inviting Him Back

There is another interesting element to Gillis’s relationship with Saturday Night Live. In 2019, NBC removed him from the cast shortly after announcing his hiring. The decision followed the resurfacing of podcast recordings containing racist and homophobic slurs.

Gillis subsequently built a successful stand-up career and returned to host in 2024 and 2025. Now he has hosted for a third time. So much for the idea that being fired necessarily ends somebody’s career. Gillis has released comedy specials, created the Netflix series Tires and keeps receiving invitations to one of America’s most recognisable comedy programmes.

That makes the latest monologue even more disappointing. He had an enormous platform, a live audience, professional writers and years of experience. Surely somebody could have developed something more interesting than women wearing shorts.

Comedy should be allowed to challenge people. It should also be funny. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. The fact that a joke offends somebody does not automatically make it clever, brave or insightful. Sometimes it is simply a bad joke.

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