Comedy Fans Say Shane Gillis Cribbed His ‘SNL’ Monologue Jokes From Another Podcaster
Every Shane Gillis fan knows that the stand-up star is a history buff, but does he know the historical record of his own jokes?
This past Saturday, Saturday Night Live host and almost-alumnus Gillis devoted nearly half of his opening monologue to roasting the late writer and historian Shelby Foote for taking creative liberties with his historical accounts in Ken Burns’ acclaimed 1990 mini-series The Civil War. Gillis joked that Burns’ nine-part documentary is “kryptonite to women,” saying of The Civil War, “If you put that on, they will fall asleep. … That’s a little Cosby tip for you, actually.” The comic then laid into frequent Civil War interviewee Foote for playing fast and loose with the minutia of the war and its combatants, describing how Foote dramatized the events and details of the Civil War with an almost sexual aplomb.
While Gillis’ ribbing of the liberals in SNL’s audience and his casually crass comments on women during the opening monologue certainly sparked low-grade controversy among the show’s majority left-leaning fandom, Gillis’ most esoteric punchlines also provoked outrage in small corners of the intentionally offensive comedy community that supported the stand-up star long before his SNL hired-to-fired scandal in 2019.
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Fans of the now-defunct and deliriously crude comedy podcast Cum Town have accused Gillis of lifting his recent riff about Foote, the historian's nearly fetishistic approach to the Civil War and Foote's artistic license in the war's retelling straight from the show that made Gillis' past use of slurs on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast sound like a Hannah Gadsby routine.
According to hundreds of users in the subreddit for The Adam Friedland Show, which is the sequel podcast to Cum Town featuring hosts Friedland and Nick Mullen, Gillis' riff about the late Foote being a pervert who fabricates ridiculous fantasies about the Civil War and the soldiers who fought it is just a drastically toned-down version of a routine that Mullen did on a 2019 episode of his old podcast. In the Cum Town bit, Mullen made the same criticisms of Foote's strange obsession with details that he couldn't possibly know about figures from the Civil War, only, instead of making Foote out to be a horned-up confederate as Gillis did, Mullen's Foote character accused everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Robert E. Lee of being a genital-mutilating pedophile.
In a thread titled “Shane Robbed Nick,” Mullen's fans trashed Gillis' SNL appearance and argued that the former's indulgently offensive caricature of the late historian was better than the latter's more sanitized and TV-friendly impression. The original poster alleged, “SNL monologue was nearly a word for word rip off of Nick’s Shelby Foote Cumtown bit."
“Nick’s lazy commentary about Shelby Foote on the podcast is funnier than Shane’s prepared bit lol,” the top commenter wrote, “I like Shane but he kinda bombed that shit.”
Criticism of Gillis' SNL jokes and comparisons to Mullens' jokes about the same suspiciously topic also spilled over onto Twitter, with one fan of late 2010s profane podcasts live-tweeting of the monologue, “Shane Gillis is ripping off a Nick Mullen bit on SNL right now (Ken Burns' Civil War/Shelby Foote).”
“Shane on his Amy Schumer arc,” another Twitter user claimed in a separate thread about the alleged joke theft.
While the topic of Foote's embellishments and weirdly intimate romanticization in The Civil War may seem too specific to be a coincidence, criticism of Foote's overly personal approach to the history of America's deadliest-ever war stretches back to the documentary's release in 1990 and continues to this day. In 2019, Smithsonian Magazine published an article titled “Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary” that focused on the faults in Foote's feelings-based accounts, calling him “a writer and journalist with no historical background" whose only valuable contribution to the series was his being “charming and stereotypically 'southern.'”
It seems more likely that two deliberately offensive comedy podcasters had the same interest in The Civil War and thought that Foote was a funny and insane character rather than Gillis deliberately lifted jokes from a comic who runs in the same circles and shares much of the same audience as him. For all the common criticisms against Gillis, he doesn't have a history of being a joke thief, and he doesn't seem dumb enough to steal material for an SNL monologue – especially for one that kind of sucked.
