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‘SNL’ Fires New Cast Member Shane Gillis Over History of Racist Jokes
BY Stephanie Larson
Published 5 years ago
Even without officially beginning his run on Saturday Night Live, Shane Gillis is already bidding goodbye to the show. On Monday, SNL has decided to part ways with the stand-up comedian over his history of racist and homophobic jokes according to The Wrap.
Just a few hours after SNL announced that Gillis will be joining the new season, a 2018 episode from his podcast Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast resurfaced wherein the comedian used racial slurs against Asians. In the clip, Gillis joked about the Chinese people saying, “Chinatown’s f—ing nuts. Let the f—ing ch–ks live there, huh?” In another video from the same podcast, Gillis took a shot at Asian people learning the English language. “An Asian trying to learn English bothers me more than someone listening to Lil Uzi Vert while I’m trying to eat f–ing dinner,” he said. “Nice racism. I love to be f–ing racist.” Currently, however, most of Gillis’ videos in the podcast has been wiped clean.
In addition to those, Vulture unearthed other videos of Gillis where he took shots at other fellow comedians with racist, sexist, and homophobic comments. This was immediately followed by a few days of unwavering outcry. And what further fueled this controversy was the fact that that same day, SNL cast Bowen Yang, its first Asian-American cast member.
SNL and Gillis Responds
After the initial outcry with people calling on him to be fired, Gillis issued an apology on his Twitter account. “I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss. If you got through my 10 years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of misses. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said,” he wrote. “My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.”
Unfortunately, the damage had been done and SNL delivered a swift response to the issue on Monday. “After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL,” said an SNL spokesperson on behalf of Lorne Michaels. “We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as comedian and his impressive audition for SNL. We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard.”
In the end, Gillis still had one last thing to say in response to his departure from the show. In another statement posted by the comedian on Twitter, he states that he respects the decision and was nevertheless grateful for the opportunity. In one last dig towards the show, Gillis declared, “I was always a Mad TV guy anyway.”
SNL was Gillis’ supposed big break on TV. He had runs on Comedy Central Radio and was also featured at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
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