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I finally gave in and watched his SNL monologue. It was ok, decently funny. Pretty mild by general comedian standards but I assume significantly cruder than most current year SNL openers. The two real laughs he got from me were “you look like a gas station egg” and “you’re either gay or you’re Hitler, that’s where we’re at as a country.” And the bit with him plodding down the hiking trail and trying not to scare the woman he ran into was a funny mental image.
He also didn’t bomb or anything (which I’ve occasionally seen claimed by some of the online rageposts), he was getting consistent laughs from the audience. And, this was clearly a success for SNL, I haven’t heard them talked about so much in ages (and I heard that this was their most-viewed monologue ever, not sure if that’s true but it clearly was highly viewed). I suspect they chose to bring him on as essentially ragebait for their main audience, while also trying to do a little bit of “we can still be edgy” signaling to the masses.
I think there are three elements for why the “women dress like whores in the gym” bit sparked so much anger. The first is, obviously, lipstick-feminist internet-rage-machine types who would’ve lost their shit about any version of this joke, not very interesting.
The second, I think, is the word “whore” itself. It’s unexpectedly harsh (which is why it was funny at all, that part of the joke was really just “I said whore on SNL lol”) but may have set off women viewers more than just saying something like “skimpy” or “sexy” or whatever and then continuing to the rest of the joke. I think this affected my wife’s perception of it, for example: she’s pretty feminist in her views but not easily offended, and the joke clearly bugged her more than she wanted to admit (this is why I watched it, I got curious). She doesn’t even dislike Shane Gillis or that style of humor; e.g. she loved Tires and likes Dave Chapelle. She argued that this one was unfunny because there’s really no joke beyond “I just said whore lol” and he should’ve either worked it in better (maybe more of a lead up about him feeling out of place around the hot gym women, or something, she suggested, so there’d be an additional punchline that kept him as part of the joke) or just dropped the shock-humor. I don’t really agree, it didn’t bother me after all, but I do agree that it’s nothing but shock humor and thus not really that funny anyway, so maybe there’s something there? Curious what any female motteposters might think.
The third part, which I think is a little more interesting, is that he’s actually making fun of a very specific type of woman: gym-fluencers who are basically filming softcore porn on the gym equipment. If you’re a boomer-lib who doesn’t get those videos in your targeted social media, or if you don’t regularly go to the gym, or even if you just don’t see these types at your gym, you might genuinely not know these girls exist! I go to a pretty normie gym (neither expensive nor dirt-cheap, mostly-young clientele, blue city) and while there are plenty of hot women, the actual “gym whore outfits” are extremely rare and I’ve never seen someone filming Content — I’m mostly only aware of the type from the internet. So a lot of the enraged audience may have sincerely thought the butt of the joke was supposed to be merely “women wearing sports bras and leggings while working out” which in fact is not what he was going for. I can imagine that if you pictured that kind of outfit and behavior, which gets attention of course but is really no sluttier than the jacked dudes wearing dolphin shorts and muscle tees while ego-lifting, the joke would seem a lot more bizarre and mean-spirited.
I'm about as anti-feminist as they come but I would say using the word "whore" detracts from the humor. Using the word "whore" would be appropriate for a conservative commentator who wants to criticize the practice (which criticism is justified IMO) as opposed to poking fun at it and getting a laugh out of people.
I largely agree, no strong feelings like I said but if pushed, I think that’s where I land as well. If you take out the word “whore” you only lose the shock humor of saying it at all (which is technically less humor, I guess, but a minor impact), and the punchline of the joke is really the following part about the shorts that focus your eyes straight at the asscrack, “but you’re not allowed to look!” So arguably it keeps the focus of the joke on the real punchline anyway.
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If you want an example of an edgy (no, legitimately shocking) SNL monologue, Louis CK has got you covered. From a comment posted two days ago:
Yeah, that was quite a bit edgier than I’d expect from SNL, appreciate the link. But it was also in 2015, just barely at the dawn of “the Current Year”… I’d be surprised if they’ve booked anyone close to that level since then.
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