‘Kill Tony’ Fans Wonder Why Lorne Michaels Thinks Kam Patterson Will Go Over Better Than Shane Gillis
Lorne Michaels is making another run at courting the Joe-Rogan-listening comedy audience that has long ignored Saturday Night Live, and he believes that his current fanbase has lost the will to fight it.
Next Friday will mark the six-year anniversary of the day Saturday Night Live fired Shane Gillis less than a week after he joined the Season 44 cast. The very same day that SNL announced the hiring of Gillis, social media erupted into coordinated outrage over old clips of Gillis using a racist slur on his show Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. Gillis insisted that his critics should consider the context of the clips and explained that he was intentionally playing a bigoted character at the time, but the damage to both his and SNL’s reputation had already been done. Shortly thereafter, Michaels caved to pressure from NBC and removed Gillis from the cast.
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Based on how Michaels continues to book Gillis as a SNL host and speaks about the the now-world-famous stand-up as if letting him go was the biggest mistake SNL ever made, it seems doubtful that new SNL cast member and Kill Tony regular Kam Patterson will face anywhere close to the level of pushback or pressure that Gillis endured during a very different time in American culture. Nevertheless, over in the Kill Tony subreddit, fans of Tony Hinchcliffe’s Austin-based comedy showcase gawked at SNL’s decision to book a high-energy, obscene and gleefully non-P.C. stand-up who makes Gillis look as inoffensive and milquetoast as a prime Jimmy Fallon.
“It’s gonna be hilarious when he drops the N word on live television,” the top commenter wrote of the news that Patterson will be the first-ever comedian to make the jump from Kill Tony fame to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Another fan wondered, "If they cancelled Shane, how will Kam ever survive lol..."
Other Kill Tony loyalists were convinced that Patterson simply wouldn't make it in the media machine that chewed up and spit out the Manosphere's biggest star in under a week. “Curious how SNL will handle Kam's ‘baggage’. Once SNL viewers catch a whiff of Kam's previous comments about the trans community, SNL will be forced to deploy the ‘Shane Gillis Exit Strategy’. Hopefully SNL handles it better this time around,” one user wrote.
At the same time, optimists argued that, given the stark cultural shifts since 2019, the Kill Tony brand of comedy that couldn't even land at a Trump rally last year has become so popular in 2025 that SNL and NBC will simply follow the shifting tides, trusting that what remains of “cancel culture” won't have enough influence to stop them.
“I think firing Shane was more of an NBC driven thing during the year or two where cancel culture was actually real,” a Kill Tony fan reflected, "Those days have passed and lessons were learned. Comedy seems to be ‘legal’ again and the idiots who freaked out are being ignored by the sponsors now. Shane basically fell through the cracks."
This certainly seems to be the case, given that it's been two days since SNL announced the Season 51 cast and exactly zero pearl-clutching liberal think pieces about Patterson's most offensive material have gone viral on Twitter. As comedy's most ruthless capitalist, Michaels isn't the kind of political maneuverer to make the same mistake twice, and both he and NBC were certainly well-aware of Patterson's favorite stand-up topics when they pulled the trigger. Anti-woke comedy is the new mainstream, and SNL is nothing if not slavishly devoted to the status quo.
Plus, Gillis getting fired from SNL wasn't exactly the career-killer that his most impassioned critics hoped it would be – if anything, the scandal put Gillis on the mainstream media's radar more than Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast ever could. In the years following his SNL hired-to-fired speedrun, Gillis became an internationally touring stand-up superstar, landed his own multi-season Netflix sitcom and hosted a major TV awards show, a group of accolades that no SNL cast member added after him has achieved.
Even if Patterson refuses to tone down his obscene, insensitive comedy for SNL and the audience absolutely hates him for it, getting fired from the show could end up being an even bigger break for his career than getting cast on it.
