Last night’s SNL was a touch awkward. The host was Shane Gillis, one of the more popular comedians right now…who happened to have been fired by the show a few years back over past racist and sexist jokes. To his credit he didn’t go the Gina Carano route and start hanging out with Ben Shapiro. That’s one reason SNL welcomed him back to a show he never got to perform on in the first place. The opening monologue was a touch rough, with strained laughs over gay jokes and jokes about down syndrome. But Gillis scored big laughs for a pre-taped sketch dragging arguably the most ridiculous thing Donald Trump has done in the last week and change.
The sketch was a fake trailer that finds Gillis as a loser who sucks at basketball — that is, until he receives a gift from Trump himself: a par of those $400 gold sneakers he was hawking last weekend. Do they make him better at basketball? Of course not. But they do give him the confidence to lie — lie about making basketball shots he missed, about his weight, about whether or not he’s good in bed. (He’s not.) The film’s title? White Men Can Trump, natch.
Elsewhere in the episode, Gillis took part in a parody of those Liberty Mutual ads featuring spokesman Doug and his anthropomorphic emu associate. They make a house call for someone who’s paying too much for car insurance, but things quickly go sideways. You can watch that sketch in the video below and the Trump sneakers one above.