I Am So Over Comics Who Simply Don’t Like Women

Reported by Vogue.

There's a certain mental gymnastics required of women who grew up loving stand-up comedy. You learned early to mentally opt out of being the target — to position yourself as the Cool Girl who laughed along, not the uptight one who couldn't take a joke. Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Ricky Gervais: their specials ran late into the night, and the implicit lesson was that "other" women — the annoying ones, the embarrassing ones — deserved whatever punchline was coming. You just had to make sure you weren't her.

Getting older meant finding better material. John Mulaney and Nick Kroll doing bit characters on a New York stage, Conner O'Malley playing a deranged fake tech bro — comedy that didn't require a woman in the audience to quietly absorb contempt as the price of admission. Not every joke was a feminist manifesto, but at least basic misogyny wasn't doing the structural work.

SNL's Gillis Problem

Which makes Shane Gillis's recent Saturday Night Live monologue feel like a particular regression. According to Vogue, Gillis used his opening set to call women in gym clothes "whores" — specifically targeting the supposed crime of wearing shorts with visible seat seams — before adding the bewildering caveat "don't look." Dan Levy responded publicly on Instagram with the observation that women wearing shorts at the gym doesn't make them whores; it makes the men labeling them that misogynists. He's not wrong, and the fact that a guest on a prestige cable show had to say it out loud is its own kind of depressing data point.

The timing sharpens the edge. Cornell University's 2024 sexual assault case has been playing out publicly, with survivors speaking about being dehumanized by men who felt entitled to their bodies. Sitting with that context and being asked to laugh at a recycled "wanton woman" trope isn't edgy — it's exhausting. SNL has historically functioned as one of America's most mainstream comedy institutions, the thing teenage girls stay up until 11:30 to watch. What exactly is a young female viewer supposed to take from Gillis's set, besides the message that her body is an inconvenience to men who can't stop staring at it?

The standard deflection — that women who object are simply offended, too sensitive, unable to handle real comedy — conveniently sidesteps the actual issue: the jokes aren't good. Lazy misogyny dressed up as transgression has always been the refuge of comedians who substituted provocation for craft. Hating women is not a point of view. It's a gap where a point of view should be.

In 2026, the Cool Girl performance has a hard expiration date — because the material it asks you to endure was never actually funny to begin with.

Read the original at Vogue.