The triumph of Shane Gillis

Last night, stand-up comic Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live – America’s premier, if long-past-its-best, sketch-comedy show – a little more than four years after he was fired from its cast, in one of the swiftest and most savage cancellations the industry had ever witnessed.

Gillis’s opening monologue, more of a club set than the usually tightly scripted fare, blew through a mix of material, new and old, about his relatives with Down’s syndrome, high-school football coaches and how young boys are essentially their mother’s gay best friends. He nodded briefly to his sacking, but as the sketches began – with Gillis playing a sex-pest co-worker who goes to the strip club at lunchtimes, before reprising his first-rate Donald Trump impression – it was like he’d never been away.

So, the man deemed morally untouchable, unworthy to be in SNL’s regular, week-in, week-out line-up just a few years ago, returned to host an episode of his own – one of American entertainment’s most coveted guest spots, usually occupied by Hollywood A-Listers. Is cancel culture’s brittle grip beginning to crack? For all our sakes, let’s hope so.