Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Ego Nwodim fired back at Shane Gillis’ gym-clothing monologue with a sarcastic Instagram Stories post on Monday.
Nwodim, 38, who left the sketch show last year after seven seasons, posed mid-workout in a black long-sleeve top, leggings and sneakers while flashing a peace sign. She captioned the shot, “whore reporting for duty.” A follow-up slide showed her breakfast with the line, “Getting my 30 grams of protein in after heauxing.”
Gillis, who hosted this weekend’s “SNL” episode, delivered jokes targeting women in neon gym shorts. He described “those neon… Like artificial bait color” shorts with “wrinkles [that] go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole.” The 37-year-old comedian added, “You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look because they are filming. I’m in the background of about 10 TikToks right now.” He also dropped an uncensored f-bomb during the broadcast.
Grammy winner Maren Morris, 36, joined the backlash Monday with an Instagram Reel giving Gillis the middle finger. She captioned the upload, “Me being a whore at the gym,” and requested he “leave [her] gym short wedgie out of it.” Morris also shared “Schitt’s Creek” alum Dan Levy’s response to her own followers.
Levy, 43, addressed his Instagram followers Sunday with a direct takedown of the monologue. “Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores,” he wrote. “It makes the men calling them whores misogynists. There’s a difference there.”
The Emmy winner continued, “y the way, I’ve seen more men’s nipples at the gym than I’ve ever seen women showing their bodies off. I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television.”
Levy urged broader male involvement in pushing back against such commentary. “More men need to be standing up in opposition,” he said, adding that males “need to be defending women more.” He tied the rhetoric to larger consequences, stating, “It’s complacency that has created the environment with which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a conversation opposed to a crime…. This is not a women’s issue, this is an everybody issue.”
He closed with a blunt declaration: “The more that men objectify women in the media, the more that other men see them as objects and treat them as objects. They are not objects. They are superior human beings to men. I’m sorry if this gets me in trouble with the internet, but f–k.”
Gillis has faced “SNL” controversy before. He was cast on the show in 2019 but axed within a week after podcast clips resurfaced in which he used racist and homophobic slurs. The firing made him a brief cause célèbre among some free-speech advocates, though he later built a successful stand-up career and podcast presence that led to this hosting opportunity.
Reps for Gillis and “SNL” did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest backlash.
