It was a bit of a hurricane of a few days for Shane Gillis. First it was announced that he was of the new featured players for the new season of Saturday Night Live but soon after that announcement was made, a 2018 YouTube video surfaced that where he used a racial slur against Asians. Everyone was waiting to see what NBC and SNL would do and now they have made their decision: Shane Gills has been let go from Saturday Night Live and will not be featured in the new season.
An SNL spokesperson said on behalf of Lorne Michaels had this to say about their decision:
“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL. 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.”
The comments on the now-deleted video from a podcast, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, were even more jarring since SNL that same day cast its first Asian-American cast member, Bowen Yang. (Gillis, Yang and Chloe Fineman were announced as the new featured players for the upcoming season.) It appears that other comments made on other editions of the podcast were unearthed, which made him continuing on SNL even more controversial.
After the comments went public, Gillis made a rather lukewarm apology in a bid to save his job:
“I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said. My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.”
You can see in his Twitter post below after his firing that he lays in a little jab at SNL which shows that he probably hasn’t learned much from his quick hiring and firing from the show.
https://twitter.com/Shanemgillis/status/1173690932832505856?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1173690932832505856&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdeadline.com%2F2019%2F09%2Fnew-saturday-night-live-cast-member-shane-gills-fired-racial-slur-use-1202733508%2F
