Shane Gillis' ESPYs Monologue Wasn't Great — But Not for the Reasons You Think

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5 days ago

The 2025 ESPY Awards will likely be remembered for Shane Gillis' monologue, even if the comedy was largely forgettable.
Gillis, a standup comedian and the co-creator and star of Netflix's Tires, is probably best known for lasting like four hours at Saturday Night Live — Lorne Michaels felt compelled to fire Gillis after some non-PC clips of a 2018 episode of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast were resurfaced — though he has gone on to host the show, twice.
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By now, you've probably read both praise and criticism on Gillis' monologue — he's that kind of comic. Gillis is wildly popular among his base, and controversial among non-fans. This was always gonna go some sort of way, and ESPN executives knew that when they gave Gillis the gig. Gillis has appeared on the network's College GameDay show, where he (internet-)famously got into it with Nick Saban, an all-time great college football coach and an analyst on the popular ESPN program.
There were some positives from Gillis' ESPYs monologue. First of all, he dressed better than I'd expect, so there's that; Gillis' respect for the audience largely stopped there.
Though Gillis had some tough (even by modern awards-show standards) punchlines for the guests, he started light.
'[Oklahoma City Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander] is here, give it up for SGA. Hell yeah, bro,' Gillis said. 'And now, everyone sitting around him is in foul trouble.'
It's a good opener — a nice B+ joke that eases the audience into things. It says Gillis is here to poke fun, not poke the bear. That was short-lived.
'Megan Rapinoe isn't here,' Gillis said next. 'Nice.'
That was the joke. And it was where things started to go sideways. For Gillis fans, a punchline of 'Nice.' and a smirk is kind of a staple of his persona — it's almost a catchphrase. The joke is polarizing, sure, but so is Rapinoe to Gillis' base (and vice-versa). Rapinoe, the U.S. soccer great, in 2016 kneeled during the national anthem in support of Colin Kaepernick. She's ripped the NCAA in front of Congress and has called out U.S. Soccer in a discrimination suit.
The joke got some laughs — it was still early on and the benefit-of-the-doubt time. Gillis saved the moment somewhat.
'No? We're gonna pretend she's a good time?' he said. 'Alright.'
Being unbothered by the negative reception of a joke or opinion is another Shane Gillis hallmark. He rolls with the punches as well as he throws punches.
Gillis is an anomaly. He presents as a right-wing good ol' boy, but he's not ignorant; Gillis does not fit neatly into the box that people project on him, and that can be confusing for crowds and critics. Like, what do you do when Shane Gillis makes Trump jokes? Let's find out.
'Donald Trump wants to stage a UFC fight on the White House lawn,' Gillis said to a crowd that included some UFC greats. 'The last time he staged a fight in D.C., Mike Pence almost died.'
It took some time, but the joke — a reference to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — worked. It even got an applause break. It was as if the crowd collectively thought, 'Oh, wait — is he on our side (politically)?' It's another regular occurrence at a Shane Gillis show, where preconceived notions (one way or the other) don't work out.
'There was supposed to be an Epstein joke here,' Gillis continued to roll at the ESPYs, gesturing to the teleprompter, 'but I guess it got deleted.'
'It probably deleted itself, right? Probably never existed, actually,' he quipped. 'Let's move on as a country and ignore that.'
Gillis does not let you pin him down. It's the political comedy you didn't expect to get out of a big guy who looks like that and pals around with Joe Rogan.
But just as quickly as Gillis got his good-guy status back among the Dolby Theatre audience, he called out Karl-Anthony Towns in a reference to viral memes that depict the New York Knicks star as an effeminate defender of the basketball.
'The New York Knicks had a great season.'
Applause.
'Karl-Anthony Towns is here. Hey guuurl!'
Perhaps surprisingly, that one actually went over alright, which is really unfortunate for K.A.T. The (mostly) positive reaction to what was effectively a gay joke seems to indicate that a crowd full of Towns' fellow professional athletes lost the 'proper' public response to such material to a subconscious sense of agreement with its concept. That cannot feel good, regardless of whether you think the joke sucks or not.
The next joke was a Juneteenth joke, so you can probably guess how that went over.
'Maxx Crosby is here. I hope you had a good Juneteenth, brother.'
Crosby is not Black, but there is a narrative out there about him having a 'pass' to use the N-word (with an 'a' at the end, not 'er') in social settings. There is also a common assumption that Crosby caught himself in mid-use of the word in a 2023 call to action for Las Vegas Raiders fans. So that's the joke, more so than a mockery of the holiday itself — but it also does (at least) kind of belittle the relatively new national holiday, which celebrates the ending of slavery.
Next, Gillis straight-up got booed — not by everyone, though enough to hear on TV — but the hyper-negative response wasn't really fair to the point of the joke.
'Joe Rogan actually wanted me to be here to host this awards show so that I could capture (NBA commissioner) Adam Silver, because Joe thinks he's an alien,' Gillis said. 'And Donald Trump wanted me to be here to capture Juan Soto, for the same reason.'
Saying Silver looks like an alien would be a cheap joke, but it's not the joke here — it's the setup. The joke is on President Trump and ICE — it is identifying the ridiculousness of the mass-deportation witch hunt. The groans and boos were a misunderstanding of the intention; they came from people who (likely) heard 'alien' in the same sentence as the name of a popular baseball player from the Dominican Republic and instinctually found it to be an off-color joke told by a racist.
But that's not the point. Gillis is calling out what he (and 80 percent of the crowd, probably) sees to be a racist initiative by the federal government. Soto is an alien; he came to the U.S. in July 2015 when he was 16 years old, and only because he was drafted by the Washington Nationals, ironically. And also, the NBA commissioner, Silver, does look like an alien.
The general reception to the monologue as a whole was mixed in the room, multiple ESPYs attendees told The Hollywood Reporter; some jokes were called 'hilarious,' while others 'missed the mark.' One production source told THR that the monologue played better in the room than on the screen.
Here, I should point out how difficult it is to have a strong ESPYs monologue. You can pretty much only make jokes about sports, and you're telling them to some of the worst sports on the planet. These aren't trained actors in the audience — it is a ballroom full of some of the most disciplined, God-gifted, physical specimens on the planet — in other words, the people that bullied the rest of us into developing a sense of humor. When you look like DK Metcalf, no one makes fun of you.
Gillis bailed himself out with his next joke. He picked the perfect target for the perfect spot in his set.
'Aaron Rodgers did not take the (COVID-19) vaccine because he thought it would be bad for him,' Gillis said. 'And then he joined the New York Jets.'
There are very few things worse for you than playing for that organization.
The joke has the same political slant as the Soto joke — it was just easier for the audience to digest. And it got Gillis on a roll.
'It's a big year for the WNBA. I love Caitlin Clark,' Gillis said. 'Caitlin Clark and I have a lot in common: we're both whites from the Midwest who have nailed a bunch of threes.'
To borrow a phrase from Gillis here: Hell, yeah.
The joke works because 1) it's clever and 2) Gillis made himself the butt of the joke. It gifted Gillis enough grace for the next one.
'When Caitlin Clark retires from the WNBA, she's going to work at a Waffle House,' Gillis said, 'so she can continue doing what she loves most: fist-fighting Black women.'
That one generally landed as well, but it tightened up some of the audience again. The joke here is about how many physical altercations Clark — a white woman — has gotten into in the WNBA, a predominantly Black league. Clark is the league's biggest star and appears to be the target of regular physical antagonization on the court. The Waffle House clientele and behavior piece is, of course, a stereotype. But together, it's funny. We can laugh about these things together.
Well, maybe not the executives backstage: ESPN has been a staunch supporter of the WNBA (and the NBA), and recently signed another long-term TV deal.
Unfortunately, after that, Gillis definitely did not land the plane.
He went on a run about legendary New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and his much younger girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. One joke was a particularly ill-advised shot about the WAGS (wives and girlfriends of sportsmen) in the crowd.
'[Bill Belichick] has won six Super Bowls. He's dating a hot 24-year-old. Maybe if you guys won six Super Bowls, you wouldn't be sitting next to a fat, ugly dog-wife.'
Woof.
Why? Well, the idea is that Belichick is a hell of a winner, and maybe the rest of the room should back off a bit on his personal life. OK sure, but mean-spirited comedy doesn't work when it's not funny. Gillis knows that, but he's an envelope pusher as much as he is a button pusher.
'They let me do it. This is Disney. They allowed that,' Gillis said. 'We should have taken that out. I had doubts going into that — that didn't work all week.'
When in doubt, go back to Trump. But not like this.
Gillis then spent more than two minutes of a 10-minute monologue telling an aimless Trump story that seemed to only exist as a platform for his (quite good) impression of the POTUS — and probably as a cheap way to get the audience back on his side. In classic Gillis fashion, however, he offset the jokes for those on the left with a joke for those on the right. Another WNBA joke — a cheap one about WNBA players looking like men — didn't work. It also just made things officially weird when you add up the number of jokes about one league. It's a bit of tipping your hand, and it's a bad look.
Gillis had one last chance to win the day. And to some degree, he did by endearing himself to the audience with a sweet, thoughtful, meta tribute.
'There's one thing I wanna say before I get out of here,' Gillis wound down. 'You guys aren't gonna like it.'
Oh, OK then. Please go on?
'But it was a Norm Macdonald joke that I loved when he hosted the ESPYs and I'm gonna do it now,' Gillis continued.
'Travis Hunter won the Heisman Trophy this year. He's the first defensive player since Charles Woodson to win the Heisman. Congratulations, Travis Hunter. Winning the Heisman — that's something they can never take away from you. Unless you kill your wife and a waiter.'
Macdonald's original telling of the joke is my favorite joke of all time — proof here — so I saw it coming with Shane's setup. It was a cool and touching idea for very few of us. For Gillis, it was personal. (Macdonald died in 2021.)
Norm, the ultimate comics' comic, was fired from SNL: Weekend Update in January 1998 after repeatedly making jokes about O.J. Simpson, a close friend of NBC's west coast president Don Ohlmeyer. Jim Downey, who wrote the jokes with Norm, was also let go (though he would return). Their SNL tenures were far, far longer than Gillis'.
Mere months after Macdonald's SNL demotion (he stayed as a cast member for a very short bit after), the Dirty Work star hosted the ESPY Awards. That year's Heisman winner was Woodson, the first-ever defensive player to win the coveted best-college-football-player trophy. Less than three years prior, Simpson, the 1968 Heisman winner, was acquitted of murder in the deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ron Goldman, a server at Mezzaluna Trattoria. Though the Heisman Trust never actually revoked Simpson's trophy — a common misconception that almost happened — it had been removed from USC's Heritage Hall lobby after Simpson's arrest (and then later put back on display, and then stolen.)
That is the environment in which the joke happened. It was perfect, it was vengeful and it was hilarious. It was almost 30 years ago, before most of the athletes in the crowd were even born. Gillis' retelling of the joke lacked the context and understanding of his audience. And that pretty much sums up Gillis' ESPYs monologue.
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