Shane Gillis’ Official Website

JUMP TO:
(2021) Live in Austin
(2023) Beautiful Dogs

Live in Austin (2021)
Rating: Good

Hey, I heard that Shane Gillis is an insensitive bro prick who makes fun of Asian people and Downs syndrome kids. I heard he got fired from SNL because clips of his podcast surfaced where he and his cohost said some very slurry things in the context of a racist 1940’s NYC landlord. I also heard he’s fat and ugly, and I heard he accidentally got a really shitty Dominican haircut before taping his Live in Austin set. I also heard that’s actually pretty damn funny.

I guess my point is that I’m going to be a Shane Gillis apologist and since you’re not reading any of this anyway, it doesn’t matter! I have had no experience with Gillis before listening to Live in Austin — none. Not his podcast, not Beautiful Dogs, nothing. And this set is fucking hilarious. Gillis’ material is almost entirely political in a manner that doesn’t come from the perspective of someone who wishes to be angry or preachy, but rather from the perspective someone who just wants to soak in all the crazy bullshit going on in America with insane curiosity. He often polarizes the audience with claims such as “Trump is funny” with plenty of arguments to back up his claims. Gillis is right: Trump is funny, but it’s always unintentional, and it’s mostly because he’s a huge autistic jerk with no sense of social norms or decorum. Gillis’ whole bit about Trump turning the 2015-2016 debates upside down on their heads is something I found legitimately humorous in spite of my very strong negative feels toward the treasonous piece of shit. The material is delivered with frat boy congeniality instead of sourpuss bitterness, and who would have thought that maybe this is the way to go?

He has a chunk on how the University of Alabama finally desegregated their football team in 1971 after they got their asses completely handed to them by a team full of black guys from USC (“Hey, uh, we’re 0-4, maybe we should, uh, consider adding some black guys to the team…?”), making the point that football can end bigotry better than anything! Get a whole team of transgendered people to blowout Alabama and you won’t hear anyone complain about their bathroom usage ever again.

Gillis only talks to the audience when he loses them a little bit, but he takes everything in stride. The bit about transgender football was off the cuff after getting slightly heckled, but then he agreed to move on from the topic. Another time he started telling some pretty mild pedophilia jokes and got a bit of a negative reaction, so he was able to move on from that, too. I like a comic who can adjust on his feet, especially when they’re relatively new at the game. Of course, he pivoted from talking about little boy volleyball shorts to how coaching a team of special kids was hilarious to him. “Special kids love ladies and John Cena. That’s it. That’s all we talked about…” And if some of this material seems callous or insensitive to you, then don’t worry! There’s a relatively inoffensive chunk about Gillis taking his heroin-addicted sister to Six Flags that’ll surely tickle those fickle ribs!

Oh yeah, I didn’t even get to mention his fantastic Fox News Dads material! My bottom line is that Gillis is good. He pushes boundaries without being mean-spirited, and he has an everyman temperament about him that’s endearing to lowlife scum like me anyway.

Beautiful Dogs (2023)
Rating: Just OK

Oh, Shane, I had the highest of hopes for you! I was expecting you to top Live in Austin with flying colors! Instead we step down a little bit, pushing a little too hard against uncomfortable boundaries in many cases, and riffing too long on some weaker material.

I’m mostly alone on thinking Beautiful Dogs isn’t a work of genius, but I was on edge that the dude was going to be cutesy and try to drop an n-bomb mid-set. I could see his fingers twitching nervously, feeling out the crowd, seeing if he might lose them. His opportunity was during the George Washington plantation slave reenactment bit! He could have thrown it like a grenade and run away in the chaos!

OK, that’s kind of unfair, but I am an annoying woke asshole sometimes and there was just too much “gay” and “retarded” references in an act from 2023 for me to handle. He does poke fun at himself throughout, claiming that he’s not a Republican “yet”, but being a history buff like himself is a gateway drug for being a Republican and he’s on a slippery slope as it is. Based on Gillis’ set, he must be one of those mythical undecided moderates who literally don’t know who to vote for in 2024. Wild.

There’s a lot of good, though, and the best is the whole George Washington plantation story. Trying to one-up the black slave reenactor trying to push the white guilt with Gillis’ own brand of MENTALLY CHALLENGED FACES had me rolling, and then the whole bit about seeing George Washington’s teeth made of animal teeth, lead, and slave teeth as the last moment of the tour, then getting pushed out into the sunny parking lot going “what the fuck was that?” was the hardest I’d laughed at something a stand-up comedian said in a long time. The jokes about how white people stopped being cool the day Jackie Robinson went up to bat for the first time were fresh as hell, along with the sidebar that predominately white countries that aren’t America don’t have enough cool black guys around to keep the white guys humble. Getting dunked on by a goth in Australia, getting a girlfriend with a Navy SEAL ex, and the furry military general being the scariest soldier Gillis had ever heard of are all top-notch comedy hilarities!

Some of the other stuff, not so much. The whole chunk on sex lands horribly, with unneeded misogyny peppered in through. “What do women do for fun, fold shit?” was so bad that he had to backpedal and legitimately half-apologize for it. It was awkward. Then he disappointedly repeated the “Down’s syndrome guys like titties and John Cena” joke from Live in Austin, a topic that could have been mined for some new takes. The story about watching the war in Iraq streaming online also meandered into nothing, with the ultimate conclusion being “I can relate with the scared dudes.” Some of this stuff could have been worked on a little longer. And, as mentioned before, everything is “gay” and “retarded” like it’s still 2002. Sorry, dude, that’s not cool anymore.

He at least capped off the set with his Trump impressions, which are immaculate. It’s funny to see a comedian make equal opportunity knocks on both Biden and Trump. One is clearly, no contest, the better option for President of the United States of America, but we can’t pretend that he’s not a doddering old fucking man. I’m glad Shane Gillis isn’t pretending he isn’t.

I think the good outweighs the bad by slim margins, but if you have a higher tolerance for frat bro comedy then you’re going to love this way more than I did anyway.