Shane Gillis figured out early into his second-ever Saturday Night Live monologue that the audience wasn’t quite feeling him.
“My favorite thing about [Joe] Biden was that anytime he was giving a speech, in between teleprompters his face would go back to being dead,“ Gillis said. ”Do you remember that?”
He did his Biden impression, before saying, “Look, I get it, you guys are pretty liberal here.”
Gillis continued, “Look, I understand being liberal, dude. It feels good. It’s powerful. It’s too powerful, dude. It’s like the Sith… Sometimes somebody says something you don’t like at work and you’re like…”
Gillis did an impression of Emperor Palpatine saying, “Do it.”
He let out a laugh and continued on, telling the audience, “Alright, now I’m going to lose you even more…”
This was Gillis’ second time hosting SNL, as well as the second time he repeatedly acknowledged within his monologue that his jokes weren’t landing with the audience.
Although the level of laughter in both monologues sounded fairly normal to casual viewers, past sketches (like Michael Che’s April Fools prank on Colin Jost, where he told the audience not to laugh) demonstrate that the show’s live performers are often hearing a worse audience response than the viewers at home.
Later on in Saturday’s monologue, Gillis was telling a risqué joke about the Civil War when he stopped and said, “Alright, I don’t know how to get out of this joke. I really wanted to talk Ken Burns with you guys.”
Earlier in his monologue, Gillis offered his thoughts on Donald Trump’s recent interest in annexing Greenland.
“You know how the Vikings used to call Greenland ‘Greenland’ and Iceland ‘Iceland’ to keep people away, when in fact Greenland is ice and Iceland is green?” Gillis said.
“I wonder if Leif Erikson’s trick from 1,000 years ago made it all the way to 2025,” Gillis joked. “Where Donald Trump was staring at a map going…”
Gillis switched into a Trump impression and said, miming pointing a map, “‘Green! And we love green!”
