The comedian Shane Gillis is fond of joking about all of the things he knows he looks like: a high-school football coach; a possible parking-lot rapist; a police-brutality skeptic, someone who asks to “see the rest of the body-cam footage before we jump to any conclusions.” He’ll pose as a recognizable genre of buffoon or creep, before subverting those expectations. In his Netflix special, Beautiful Dogs, he pretended to be a rah-rah jingoist before lamenting America’s epidemic of gun violence; he also joked about becoming an “early-onset Republican” before noting that his emergent concerns boil down to “Why are Black guys in every commercial?” and “Mermaids are white!” In many of his routines, he embodies the anxieties felt by a certain stratum of straight white men about their waning cultural influence—and then he makes these anxieties the butt of the joke.
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