Being a stand-up comedy fan since childhood has often been an exercise in disassociation.
Watching specials by Louis C.K. and Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais on my mom’s work computer late at night, I learned to put space between myself and “other women”—that is, the women those comics took aim at. “Other” women were silly, flighty, embarrassing, annoying (such as those referenced in Burr’s 2017 riff about how there’s “plenty of reasons to hit a woman…you just don’t do it”). When I grew up, I vowed, I would be a Gone Girl-style Cool Girl, one who made the jokes instead of suffering them.
As I got older, however, I discovered new comedian lodestars. I delighted in John Mulaney and Nick Kroll embodying Upper West Side alter kaker in Oh, Hello, and Conner O’Malley doing bizarre performance art as the fake tech entrepreneur Richard Eagleton. Not all of their material was inherently feminist or affirming, but at least I could watch it without being distracted by basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor.”
Sadly, those who tuned in to Saturday Night Live over the weekend got just that. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” host Shane Gillis said during his opening monologue. “Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. You’ve seen the shorts? They’re those neon, like, artificial bait-colored [shorts], and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look.” (In a video later posted to Instagram, Dan Levy spoke for many viewers when he remarked: “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”)
