Bobby Bones Calls Shane Gillis’ SNL Monologue ‘Funny’ as Backlash Over Gym Joke Keeps Growing

Every few months, Saturday Night Live hands the stage to a comedian who makes the whole internet pick a side. This past weekend, that comedian was Shane Gillis, and the side-picking started before the cold open was even over.

Gillis hosted SNL on Saturday, October 10, and his opening monologue went exactly the way his monologues tend to go: loose, a little reckless, and built to get a reaction. One stretch in particular lit up social media. Talking about getting back to the gym, Gillis joked that women now dress in a way he could only describe with a slur, then launched into a bit about neon shorts, the way the fabric bunches, and the awkward reality that everyone in the gym is on camera whether they like it or not.

Plenty of viewers hated it. Plenty of others laughed. And by Tuesday, the debate had pulled in one of country radio’s biggest names.

Bobby Bones, the host of The Bobby Bones Show and a former Dancing With the Stars champion, weighed in on his football podcast, “25 Whistles with Bobby Bones.” His verdict? He thought the monologue was funny.

Now, Bones wasn’t out there defending every single word. His take was more about the act itself. He said Gillis “goes at it” on stage, takes chances, and that he respected the willingness to swing big in front of a live national audience. The gym bit, specifically the riff comparing the neon shorts to the bright colors of fishing lures, is what got him. He called that comparison genuinely funny, the kind of left-field image that sticks in your head precisely because it’s so specific.

Then he did what a lot of people do when they find themselves on the unpopular side of an internet argument: he tried to explain why other people didn’t get it. Bones joked that if you didn’t laugh at the fishing-lure line, you were probably not from the South, or you’d just never been fishing. That framing did not exactly calm anyone down. Within hours, his comments were getting clipped, quoted, and argued over in the same feeds that had already spent two days fighting about Gillis.

It is worth remembering who Bones is in all this. He’s not a shock comic. He’s a morning-radio guy who built a career on being likable, telling stories, and playing country music. He won the Dancing With the Stars mirrorball in 2018, he’s mentored contestants on American Idol, and his whole brand is built on being the approachable everyman of Nashville. So when he steps into a culture-war comedy fight, it lands a little differently than when another stand-up does it. His audience isn’t the late-night crowd. It’s people driving to work, and a good chunk of them had opinions.

Why the Monologue Blew Up in the First Place

Let’s be honest about what happened on Saturday night. Gillis walked out, did his thing, and within minutes, the monologue was the most talked-about part of the show. The gym joke was the flashpoint. Critics called it crude and lazy, a cheap shot dressed up as an observation. Supporters said it was just a comedian noticing something real about modern gym culture and exaggerating it for a laugh, which is, you know, the job.

The part that really stung people was the word choice. Calling women a slur for what they wear to work out hit a nerve, and it hit it fast. Social media did what social media does. One side posted clips with captions about how comedy is dead and nobody can take a joke anymore. The other side posted the same clips with captions about how this was never funny in the first place. Both sides were sure the other side was missing the point entirely.

What made it messier is that Gillis isn’t just any host. His history with SNL is one of the strangest in the show’s fifty-year run. Back in 2019, he was hired as a cast member, then fired days later after old podcast clips surfaced in which he used slurs. Most people would have vanished from the show’s orbit forever. Gillis didn’t. He rebuilt his career on the road and on his own terms, became one of the biggest stand-ups in the country, and then came back to host. Saturday was his third time hosting. That’s a comeback arc you don’t see very often, and it means every monologue he delivers gets watched through two lenses at once: is it funny, and what does it mean that SNL keeps inviting him back?

Dan Levy Fired Back, and He Didn’t Mince Words

While Bones was saying he laughed, Dan Levy was saying he was stunned.

The Schitt’s Creek co-creator posted a video to Instagram on Sunday that pulled no punches. Levy said flat-out that women wearing short shorts to the gym doesn’t make them anything except people working out, and that the men calling them names are the ones with the problem. He added, with the kind of dry timing you can’t teach, that he’s seen more men’s nipples at the gym than he’s ever seen women showing off their bodies.

Then he went further, and this is the part that got shared the most. Levy said he was “speechless” that a bit like that could air on live national television, and argued that more men need to speak up against this kind of material. His point wasn’t just about one joke. He tied it to a bigger pattern, saying that staying quiet about objectifying women in the media is part of how a culture ends up treating them like objects in real life. He closed by saying women aren’t objects at all, adding with a grin that they’re actually superior to men, and apologizing in advance if that got him in trouble with the internet.

It did not get him in trouble. If anything, it got him a standing ovation online. The video racked up more than a million likes, with support pouring in from Reese Witherspoon, Hannah Einbinder, Elizabeth Banks, Jessica Alba, and plenty of others who shared or reshared it. Levy’s response became the other half of the story, the counterweight to the laugh-it-off crowd.

That’s the split the whole week has been about. On one side, people like Bones, who heard a fishing-lure joke and laughed. On the other, people like Levy, who heard a slur aimed at women just trying to work out and said enough is enough. Both reactions are real. Neither side is going to convince the other with a podcast clip or an Instagram reel.

The Night Wasn’t Just About the Monologue

Here’s the thing that gets lost when one joke eats the whole news cycle: the monologue wasn’t even Gillis’s only headline from Saturday night.

Later in the show, during a Green Eggs and Ham sketch built around Dr. Seuss characters, Gillis dropped an F-bomb live on air. He was playing the son of the Cat in the Hat, played by Mikey Day, and got into a back-and-forth with Andrew Dismukes as Sam I Am over whether his dad had to eat the green eggs and ham. Mid-argument, the curse word slipped out. You could see it register on his face in real time. He waved at the crowd, tried to get back into character, and the sketch rolled on, with Day’s character eventually kicking him out of the house and calling him out for the bad word.

The censors didn’t catch it in time for the live broadcast, though the clip posted online later had it edited out. Gillis apologized at the end of the show, saying “Sorry about earlier,” and reportedly apologized to producers backstage too.

By Monday, word was out that SNL wasn’t going to punish him for it. Sources close to the show described it as a genuine accident, the kind of thing that happens on live TV, and made clear he won’t be banned. Which, given his history with the show, is its own kind of statement. The guy who was fired before he ever appeared on screen is now someone the show treats as a trusted regular.

So Where Does This Leave Everybody?

Here’s where the story actually gets interesting. Not the joke itself, but what the reaction says about where comedy and live TV are right now.

SNL has always lived on this fault line. The show’s best eras were built on performers who said things that made half the audience gasp. The difference now is that the gasp happens in real time, on every platform at once, and by Sunday morning, the monologue has already been tried, convicted, and appealed three times on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. There’s no waiting for the Monday watercooler anymore. The watercooler is your phone, and it’s already on fire before the goodnights.

That’s the world Gillis walked into, and honestly, it’s the world he thrives in. His whole appeal is that he doesn’t sand down the edges. Love it or hate it, there’s no mystery about what you’re getting. The audience that buys tickets to his arena shows wants exactly that. The SNL audience is broader, though, and that’s where the friction comes from. A joke that kills in a comedy club can land very differently when it’s beamed into living rooms at 11:30 on a Saturday night.

Bones, for his part, isn’t really a combatant in this fight so much as a bystander who picked a side out loud. His comment about fishing was the kind of thing you say on a podcast with your friends, and it blew up because everything about this story blows up. If you squint, his reaction is actually pretty relatable. Most people have laughed at something and then realized, a beat too late, that the room didn’t laugh with them. The difference is that Bones’s room was the internet, and the internet never forgets a take.

As for Gillis, he’s said nothing publicly about the monologue backlash so far. No apology tour, no clarifying statement, no subtweet. That silence is probably deliberate. In his world, explaining the joke is worse than telling it. And judging by the way his career has gone since 2019, silence has worked out fine for him before.

The debate isn’t going anywhere, though. Every time SNL books a host who lives on the edge, this cycle starts again: the monologue, the backlash, the counter-backlash, the celebrity reactions, the think pieces. Bones and Levy just happened to be this week’s most quotable entries. Next time, it’ll be someone else. The only sure thing is that the next monologue will be watched even more closely, because that’s how this works now. Everyone’s waiting for the next line that splits the room in half.

Source: Just Jared