Shane Gillis Pays Tribute to Norm Macdonald in His Most Underappreciated ESPYs Joke
The audience at last night’s ESPY Awards was lukewarm at best toward their host Shane Gillis, just like Norm Macdonald would have wanted.
Much like Gillis’ hosting gigs at Saturday Night Live, where he famously set the record for quickest turnaround from hired-to-fired, Gillis’ performance at the awards ceremony dedicated to giving America’s most beloved, compensated and awarded athletes even more attention was underscored by his visible nerves and the sporting world’s muted responses to his opening monologue. Despite how the wealthiest and most worshipped celebrities in our country often refused to laugh at themselves, Gillis’ material, unlike his stage presence, was actually rock-solid more often than not, and he capped off the up-and-down monologue with a tribute to the greatest ESPYs host ever and a jab at said legend’s favorite punching bag.
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In honor of Macdonald, Gillis closed his set with an O.J. Simpson joke that temporarily turned the ultra-rich, thin-skinned superstars of the sporting world into a sea of shredded Don Ohlmeyers.
Unlike Simpson himself, that joke definitely didn’t kill, but, honestly, the smattering of angry-laughs that Gillis earned before telling the sporting world that clearly had their feelings hurt by the previous eight minutes of his set, “I see a lot of you don’t like me, and that’s okay” are much more fitting for a tribute to the late, great Macdonald than a sycophantic set of celebrity worship that would have earned Gillis a standing ovation from the crowd of near-billionaire narcissists.
Maybe Gillis’ ribs of the audience in his previous monologue jokes conditioned the ESPYs crowd against their host. Maybe his visibly uncomfortable demeanor killed the energy long before he could get to his closer. Or, alternatively, maybe there are still a large number of hold-outs in the professional athlete community who still believe in Simpson’s innocence despite the overwhelming evidence against him, and they feel that a joke about Simpson losing his Heisman trophy over some silly double-murder barely a year after his death is in poor taste.
But, at the awards ceremony that cemented Macdonald’s legacy as the greatest Simpson-roaster in history, Gillis’ choice to end the monologue on one more murder joke fit like a glove.
