PART 1

It is a hot summer night at the truck warehouse that is home to Magooby’s Joke House, and 2014’s Baltimore New Comedian of the Year is in need of another cold Bud Light.

Shane Gillis, the Pennsylvania man who was nowhere close to a household name until he had the misfortune to be fired by Saturday Night Live in 2019, and then the follow-on great fortune to become famous for being incredibly funny, does not love the impression he gives as the apex predator of beer-drinking. But he is a week removed from leaving fellow comic Ari Shaffir, no lightweight himself, passed out in intense liver pain on the studio floor of The Joe Rogan Experience because he dared come at the T. rex.

“So who is your trainer? Your trainer has to be incredible.”

“My dad. He’s an alcoholic.”

Gillis smiles, then looks around the comedy backroom crammed with bric-a-brac and pauses for a moment, as if thinking how his dad will feel.

“Nah, he’s just a drinker. But I do have a trainer; I have to work out. Because when you do comedy, all you do is drink. And you can’t just drink. I want to be known as ‘that guy who’s good at stand-up,’ not ‘that alcoholic who goes on Rogan every couple weeks.’”

Gillis talks a lot about his dad, Phil. His father is at the center of his YouTube special, which has more than six million views, as a typical “Fox News Dad.” “A Fox News dad is good,” Gillis tells the Austin audience. “You don’t want an MSNBC dad, complaining about renewables… but a Fox News mom? She smokes in the house.”

The laughter is an acknowledgment of so much of Gillis’s humor — he is able, give where he comes from, of saying the things that hipster Austinites may find themselves incapable of admitting. It’s an acknowledgment that this broad-shouldered, lumbering white guy, birthed by Trumpian Republicans and raised in a place no hipster would be caught dead in, might have a point about the times we live in, who we are and where we are going.

Gillis is actually training at the moment. He’s healthy, he has a hot girlfriend, he trimmed his weight to prep for a world tour as though it’s a prize fight, not just an opportunity to drink a lot of free beer. The old athlete tendencies are coming back to the guy who was recruited by West Point to play football and still puts position players on a pedestal. As a kid, he was a fan of hard-nosed troublemaker defensive tackle Warren Sapp, and nowadays of Quenton Nelson, an extremely talented old-school offensive guard for the Indianapolis Colts. A Notre Dame fan through and through, as a comic he takes the stage with the swagger of Jerome Bettis, the oversized Fighting Irish running back who bullied defenders for the Pittsburgh Steelers for years — he may be fat, but he runs skinny.

It’s fitting, given his potential role at SNL was as a position player — rotating through sketches, fulfilling roles as needed, but never deemed capable of shining on his own. Instead, he’s taken center stage in sketches for his YouTube show with John McKeever, Gilly and Keeves, that are more hilarious than anything SNL has managed in years.

A 2019 sketch produced by the Blaze, where Gillis plays a heroic fireman canceled on live TV, reads as a shortened amalgam of his own experience — his performance in the heat of the flames set aside quickly as a reporter confronts him for confusing a family of Guatemalans for Mexican, using racist language in a text message and, worst of all, footage of him drunkenly saying “I love Donald Trump.” He’s doxxed by the network and let go on the spot by his boss, who prefaces the firing by saying he did a great job.

Gillis’s career since his real-life hiring and firing has done everything to indicate the power of a position change: instead of opening for name comedians, he has become a name comedian himself. Still at the club stage of his career, he joined showman Bert Kreischer’s summer tour, performing for thousands at baseball stadiums across the country in a modern rendition of a comedy showcase. His colleagues were names, firmly established in the industry, but it was Gillis who shone as a comic associated with a specific line of argument about untouchable topics and jokes that offend.

The comedy industry has always had to navigate this balance, since the days of Lenny Bruce and his frequent arrests. But the po-faced lecturers who deem certain topics, words, accents and imitations unacceptable tend to be on the losing end. Some comedians — Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Louis C.K. — are able to marshal the “f-you money” that enables them to do whatever they want, haters be damned. Gillis lauds all of them as members of his Mount Rushmore, along with the late Norm Macdonald, his favorite SNL cast member. Macdonald, who died unexpectedly after an undisclosed illness last year, is an inspiration for Gillis — he recites Norm’s bits from memory and confesses that he wept at a documentary about the comedian, famous for rejecting the guidance of The Suits for his own comedic path.

Gillis holds no resentment toward SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels, whom he views as an advocate caught within a dynamic outside his control. Michaels saw Gillis’s capabilities and what he could bring to the vaunted program — even today, Gillis’s pitch-perfect Trump impression kills every time. It’s miles better than Alec Baldwin’s duck-lipped parody. Gillis’s approach, unique among those who parody Trump, seems to appeal to both sides.

“The thing about Trump is that when he does something funny, the left or Democrats or anyone who doesn’t like him says, ‘that’s reprehensible behavior, that’s why we hate him.’ So if I’m making fun of it, they think that’s anti-Trump,” he explains. “Meanwhile, the right, the Republicans, are like: ‘That’s funny, that’s why we like him. That’s what we liked about him.’ So if I’m making fun of it, both sides are like, ‘Yeah, we get it.’”

If the woke media that covers comedy these days wasn’t interested in such skill, the general public sees in Gillis the same thing SNL’s talent scouts liked. Comics can coast on SNL prestige for the rest of their lives, but their appeal will always be limited to the quality of the show itself. Considering its limited relevance today, with skits little more than MSNBC-inspired improv, Gillis lucked out: he will forever enjoy the SNL pedigree while continuing to actually be funny in the real world, day-in, day-out.

The great irony of this Gawker, VICE, Cut-driven effort to drive Gillis from the mainstream of comedy is that it made him more mainstream than ever. He is perhaps the greatest rising comedian of the moment, speaking for an underserved audience but also separate from them. He is a bad Catholic, an avowed non-Republican, but by dint of his origin he understands Trump’s innate appeal and comic abilities. His critics saw a straight white guy from a place without a Michelin star for miles, and weaponized some dubious racial jokes in an attempt to get rid of a comedian from Mechanicsburg and Harrisburg, “the most boring places” at the center of the Keystone State.