Shane Gillis Disappoints, Mike Myers’ Musk Delights

He was definitely a disaster as a sketch performer this second time, which was a surprise as we were impressed with his first outing. His boorish white guy energy was mined to great effect in 2024, but nothing worked as well this time around.

The edgy standup who cost himself this job in 2019 with his own racist podcast jokes the year prior, gave flat, stilted deliveries with an even heavier reliance on the cue cards.

It didn’t help that his own standup monologue was pretty much a disaster from start to finish, with the audience not getting it or him as he fumbled his way through one awkward, unfunny moment to the next.

Shane likes to ride the edge of good taste in his comedy, leaning into his almost racist redneck caricature, but it wasn’t really working for him this time around. That’s not to say the whole episode was a wash, just that Shane was uncomfortably the worst part of almost all of his appearances.

Mike Myers, on the other hand, was a charming delight with a surprise appearance as Elon Musk in the colden open that tackled Volodymyr Zelynskyy’s uncomfortable Oval Office visit (to put it mildly).

There were some strong moments elsewhere on the night, too, don’t get us wrong. The Voice parody was great — as was Shane in it (yes, doing the same type of character) — as was a hilarious wedding sketch that took a weird turn. A lot of the sketches were almost funny, but came of as slightly half-baked or unfinished.

Shane was probably hoping to have a second strong outing to redeem his firing and become like a John Mulaney or Nate Bargatze, a comic who brings a uniquely weird voice to SNL. He definitely brings his own vision, it just left us completely underwhelmed this time around.

As usual, we’re ranking all the sketches from worst to first, including the Monologue, Cold Open, “Weekend Update” and any sketches that were cut for time but made their way online. We’ll skip the musical guests, because they’re not usually funny — unless Ashlee Simpson shows up. We wrap up with a look at the cast-member who had the strongest week.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a standup comic just straight-out bomb on the SNL stage, but Shane Gillis certainly failed to connect in any possible way with this audience. The biggest problem was that all of his material felt half-baked, with us wondering how he got through dress with such an awkward, chaotic delivery. There were a few small audience laughs here and there, but he mostly played to the death he said Biden showed between teleprompters. But at least he knew how poorly it was going, giggling at what a disaster it was. “”Alright, now I’m gonna lose you even more,” he said before going into one of his best jokes when he asked the white guys if they ever asked their girls, “Have you ever–” And he didn’t even have to finish the question. But then he ended on Ken Burns’ Civil War material … but this man is no Nate Bargatze.

Emil Wakim’s monologue about his lost youthful skills was pretty funny, but the rest of the sketch didn’t quite live up to it. A lot of that has to do with the lack of charisma that Shane Gillis brought to this character, recalling Emil’s character’s childhood talent that he apparently showed off (kind of) back in eighth grade. Basically, this felt like there was a premise and a hook for the sketch, but it never really fleshed out into the character piece it was meant to be. It wasn’t awful, but felt too one-note and fell a little flat.

We needed the list of side effects on this new medication parody. All in all, though, it was pretty funny to see that what Shane Gillis needed to cure his depression (which was just him being an inattentive, overly-aggressive a-hole) was “a coupleabeers” — and maybe “alilbump” — to get through his day. The sketch was stronger than Shane’s performance in it, with the host even appearing to flub a line in a pre-taped bit and they just went with it. It was awkward, but brilliantly clever at the same time. In the hands of a stronger performer, it could have been a classic.

A Heidi Gardner showcase that could have gone much further, we loved her character as a self-centered vapid young woman who tears into everyone around her, including Shane Gillis as her boyfriend and his “ugly” parents, portrayed by Andrew Dismukes and Ashley Padilla. Andrew and Ashley could have been a little stronger in their reactions to her. It felt like the core of this sketch was fantastic, but they should have really just gone for it. She’s an awful caricature of some real people, so have it be truly awful — and maybe not just peter out and validate her worldview (though I guess that’s a statement that everyone who exists for clout on social media is the same type of terrible.

Shane Gillis’ portrayal of a terrible father hosting a kid’s show was pretty on-point, though his delivery continued to suffer. Still, this was some very strong material with great supporting performances by Andrew Dismukes and Sarah Sherman as his uncomfortable kids and Ashley Padilla, in particular, as his ex-wife. Heidi Gardner’s puppet character as the woman who did that thing last night and therefore shouldn’t meet his kids was weird and funny and awkward all at the same time. Shane’s “Dad” was a real P.O.S. to her and everyone, which was pathetic and more funny than not.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim’s WANU Mid-Day newscasters getting all fired up over crime stories, competing with white co-anchors Heidi Gardner and Shane Gillis over whether or not their criminals are white or Black. The stereotypes were running hard in this one on both sides, which is where a lot of the humor came from. But really, it’s watching how fired up Kenan and Ego get when it’s clearly a white perpetrators. The laughs did start to run thin a bit toward the end, but it was still a great callback to a very funny format.

From comparing the disastrous Trump-Zelynskyy Oval Office meeting to the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively legal battle to MSNBC and NBC losing their Black anchors — with Michael Che saying there’s only one more to go while showing a pic of himself — the boys were in sharp form as they caught up on the latest nonsense in the world of politics and beyond. At this point, their easy rapport and the rapid-fire craziness of these early months of the Trump administration are making it easy. They even had two ridiculous AI videos to make fun of: the prank one of Trump licking Musk’s feet, and the one the president shared of Trump Gaza … that probably should have been a prank.

An attempt at a catchphrase, but Marcello Hernández didn’t lean hard enough into that for his “Movie Guy” character. The fact he hadn’t watched any of the nominated films is a pretty tired trope in these sorts of situations. Him threatening Colin Jost for questioning how he says certain things was okay, as was his asides about Spongebob Squarepants, but he didn’t quite go enough in either direction. If all of his movie talk had wound up being deep dives into Spongebob, that would have been pretty funny. Instead, we had Marcello giggling at his own half-baked jokes in a segment that didn’t feel fully fleshed out just yet.

As they shifted from politics, the boys were able to shift to some more real craziness, like the dead body on a plane and the theater ceiling collapse, though Che really appreciated Jost’s racism joke about Beyond the Gates, and his own sexist joke about the one-armed basektball player. “It’s the ’90s!” he reminded the audience, in his favorite callback of all time in another successful segment, where the only joke the audience didn’t really respond to was his cocaine wig comparison.

A much more successful outing for Jane Wickline, whose unique comic view has struggled to find its footing — hang in there, Sarah Sherman had similar struggles early on — this song was perfectly awkward and uncomfortable. She took a classic moral dilemma and tried to turn it into a romantic song. We’d have actually enjoyed a little more darkness in the captivity sequence before the inevitable return to the tracks, just to show how far she’d go, but it was the perfect level of silliness to wrap the segment.

The collision of the two biggest things going on in the federal government came when Elon Musk crashed Trump’s Oval Office sitdown with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with Mike Myers a fun surprise as a glitching Musk in the sketch. It started with James Austin Johnson’s Trump and Bowen Yang’s J.D. Vance tearing into Mikey Day’s take on the Ukrainian leader, who barely got a word in edgewise before Vance’s “audition for the Real Housewives of Potomac” screaming match.

What was remarkable about this was that by the end of the sketch, with Myers’ Musk jumping up and down and Yang’s Vance shouting and getting all worked up for no reason, you quickly realized that while four years ago Trump himself was the most cartoonish character in the White House, with SNL poking fun at his kids, he’s got some pretty strong competition this time around. All of these white guys are so over-the-top in their behavior, it’s almost impossible to exaggerate anything enough to make it a parody.

This Voice parody shows how important vetting contestants is at the producer level before they get on the show, because Shane Gillis’ golden-voiced character is absolutely the worst. Possibly a pedophile, definitely creepy as hell, he has the voice of an angel, but every word he says is worse than the last. Loved the coaches’ chairs turning back around after they got a look at him, and then back and forth as they tried to give him chance after chance, only for him to blow each one with just how awful of a human being he is. It was nice to see the PDD boys step outside their usual office sketches for this parody piece, with Ego Nwodim a particular standout as one of the Coaches.

A very nice escalation and conclusion for this sketch where Shane Gillis interrupted Sarah Sherman and Devon Walker’s wedding to try and redeem a coupon for an “open eyes” sex act from Sarah before she tied the knot. This opened a can of worms when it came to coupons. We were distracted by Devon seemingly pulling out two coupons, only to tuck a pink one under his arm and never reference it, but otherwise, every reveal only added to the humor and direction of the piece.

This was a big week for all three of our new featured players. Ashley Padilla showed up three times and again proved that she’s the strongest sketch performers of all of them, stealing scenes every time she was on-camera. Meanwhile, Jane Wickline shined with her latest Update song, while Emil Wakim proved he can carry a sketch and a scene with that 10-to-1 doctor bit.

It was a huge night for Heidi, who surprisingly didn’t go as far as we’d have liked — and we know she’s capable of — as the vapid girlfriend at a vineyard, while Sarah continues to impress with her versatility as a performer, though we do miss her singular weirdness.

With most of the cast limited to three or fewer appearances, it really came down to who had the biggest standout moments of the night for us this week. Bowen killed it in his singular moment as J.D. Vance in the Cold Open, while Kenan had us giggling in back-to-back moments as a minister and Mid-Day co-anchor.

But we’re going to have to give the edge to his fellow co-anchor Ego Nwodim, for bringing such a believable characterization to that role, as well as most of those she plays on this show. Pair it with a pitch-perfect performance in the Please Don’t Destroy sketch, and Ego had a flawless night. She’s become such a reliable performer, she can be easy to overlook (when she’s not from Temecula), but that consistency is incredible.

Saturday Night Live returns next week with host and musical guest Lady Gaga.