When a comedian gets in trouble, Bill Burr believes he knows who's to blame. “This is fucking millennials! You're a bunch of rats, all of you!” he yelled, to audience cheers, on the talk show Lights Out With David Spade last week. The stand-up was offering his perspective on Saturday Night Live's hiring and rapid firing of Shane Gillis due to a plethora of racist material the latter had recorded. “None of them care! All they wanna do is get people in trouble!” Burr continued, eliciting laughs from the crowd. It was typical button-pushing from the comedian: a hot take wrapped in a crude insult, delivered loudly and enthusiastically. Usually, though, he follows up such bits with actual introspection.
Burr wasn't the only comedian to defend Gillis in some form. Sitting next to Burr on the Lights Out panel was the Australian comic Jim Jefferies, who said Gillis's firing was “cancel culture” going after “a couple things back in his history.” The SNL alumni Rob Schneider and Norm Macdonald offered their support for Gillis on Twitter. But each of these defenders seemed more concerned with the general precedent of SNL reneging on its hiring decision because of internet backlash—and with the idea that there might be a limit on what comedians can say going forward. None wrestled with the offensive jokes in question; no one analyzed Gillis's attempts at making comedy, how miserably he had failed, and how that failure led to his undoing as much as anything else.
