Inde Navarrette hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time on October 31. Three weeks after Shane Gillis’s gym joke caused an uproar, she answered it with one line, and the studio audience loved it.
Inde Navarrette did not name Shane Gillis once in her SNL monologue. She did not have to.
The 25-year-old star of Obsession hosted the show’s Halloween episode on October 31, her first time hosting. Halfway through her monologue, she brought up her next big job. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to be in a Marvel movie,” she said. She is playing Rogue in the new X-Men film. Then she explained how she had been getting ready for it.
“I know it’s really important for Marvel that you get really fit. So I’ve been working out a lot. So every morning, I put on my little wh*re outfit, and I hit the gym.”
Inde Navarrette, SNL, October 31
The audience clapped and cheered. Everyone in the room knew exactly whose line she was borrowing.
Jump to: What Shane Gillis said · The backlash · Why the callback worked · Watch both monologues
What Shane Gillis said
Gillis hosted SNL for the third time on October 10. In his stand-up monologue, he talked about going back to the gym. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like wh*res now,” he said, as quoted by TheWrap. He went on about the shorts, which he described as “neon, like, artificial bait-colored”, and kept telling the crowd: “You’re not allowed to look.”
It was not the only rough moment of his night. Gillis also swore by accident during a live “Green Eggs and Ham” sketch, and apologised at the end of the show.
The backlash
The gym joke drew a wave of criticism online, with many calling it sexist. The loudest response came from Dan Levy, the creator and star of Schitt’s Creek, who posted an Instagram video denouncing the bit and criticising SNL for airing it.
“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whres. It makes the men calling them whres misogynists.”
Dan Levy, on Instagram
Levy said he was “speechless that something like that can exist on live national television.”
Former SNL cast members joined in with jokes of their own. Ego Nwodim posted a gym photo of herself on Instagram, calling herself a “wh*re reporting for duty.” Cecily Strong showed off her “new slutty ass orange shoes” on the way to Pilates. Across the Atlantic, SNL UK’s Weekend Update co-anchor Ania Magliano took aim at Gillis on October 17. According to E! News, Gillis did not respond to a request for comment.
Where should a comedian draw the line? We asked comics who work with edgy material in dark jokes: where’s the line?
Why the callback worked
Navarrette’s answer worked because she treated the line as a callback, not a lecture. She did not explain the controversy, name Gillis or ask the audience to be angry. She took his exact words, put them in her own mouth in a completely ordinary setting, and let the crowd fill in the rest. A three-week-old joke turned into her punchline in one sentence.
It is the oldest trick in stand-up: set it up, then pay it off when nobody expects it. Here the setup had been running for three weeks on social media, so the payoff only needed one line. For more on how comedians build these, read the anatomy of a powerful callback.
The rest of the monologue played on her Obsession character, Nikki. Asked whether she was anything like her, Navarrette said “No”, then introduced her boyfriend in the audience. The camera cut to a man duct-taped to a chair, giving a thumbs-up. Later in the episode, cast member Jeremy Culhane turned up dressed as Wolverine to pitch himself for her X-Men film, and Tom Hanks brought back David S. Pumpkins for Halloween.
Watch both monologues
Here is Inde Navarrette’s monologue from the official SNL channel:
And here is the Shane Gillis monologue from October 10 that started it all:
Sources: TheWrap, E! News, TV Insider.
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