It’s been a big week for Shane Gillis, and he didn’t even have to lift a finger for it. Earlier this week, he was featured as a supporting player in The New Yorker‘s profile of Bowen Yang, as the two were both hired as featured players on Saturday Night Live at the same time. But Gillis was fired almost immediately after critics resurfaced offensive jokes, including the use of slurs against Asian people. Now we’re getting the same story from SNL boss Lorne Michaels’ perspective in a new interview from The Hollywood Reporter.
Asked if he’s more concerned about being politically correct now than when the show started in 1975, Michaels reflected on The Shane Gillis Incident as an example. “We had a bad time when I added Shane Gillis to the cast [in 2019]. He got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier [racist and homophobic jokes] and the overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show,” Michaels recalled. “It became a scandal and I go, ‘No, no, he’s just starting and he’s really funny and you don’t know how we’re going to use him.’”
There’s a strong case to be made that Gillis’ work hasn’t materially changed since 2019. Though he apologized “to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I said,” he later called his own apology “corny” and took it back pretty quickly. After the firing, Gillis’ star continued to rise, but he also continued to engage with and dabble in corners of the comedy world that are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
Nevertheless, Michaels invited him back to host in February 2024, and in his opinion “we saw, ‘Oh right, he’s really talented, and he would’ve been really good for us.’” (The A.V. Club might disagree, having rated his episode a C+.) Michaels’ point about political correctness is that “everything became way too serious. It was like a mania. And the velocity of cancellation—and lots of people deserved to not be liked—it just became not quite the Reign of Terror, but it was like you’re judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, ‘Are they any good at the thing they do?’” he said to THR. “I do think that period is winding down and, I believe, the people who do awful things will still be punished.”
It’s true, cancel culture is not quite the Reign of Terror. It can’t even earnestly be compared to McCarthyism, given how relatively few folks in comedy and elsewhere have actually been blacklisted from Hollywood based on “cancellation.” Gillis, for example, did get fired from SNL but now has his own Netflix show. Meanwhile, Asian American advocacy groups are still seeking a genuine apology from Gillis, and as recently as June of this year were calling for Netflix to cut ties with him.
Michaels’ view of the situation—”Are they any good at the thing they do?”—is both more practical and more ruthless, but at least it’s consistent; he’s the same guy who brought on Donald Trump in 2015 and Andrew Dice Clay in 1990. It sounds like being the ultimate decision maker, in this and other areas of the show, is what’s keeping him going, despite having previously flirted with retiring after the landmark 50th season. “It’s more about keeping it on course than anything else, and, obviously, I really love it. And every year there are more and more people that I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing,’” he explained to THR. “So, I don’t really have an answer; I just know that this is kind of what I do and as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it. There’s no immediate plan.”