Shane Gillis Apologized to Bowen Yang After ‘SNL’ Hiring Controversy

Bowen Yang didn’t have much time to relish the announcement that he’d been hired as a Saturday Night Live featured player in 2019. Within hours, the internet was sharing podcast clips of Yang’s new castmate Shane Gillis making homophobic jokes and using Asian slurs. As SNL’s first Chinese-American comic and an openly gay man, Gillis’ words put Yang smack in the middle of a conversation that he didn’t start. 

He was napping when the news broke, he told The New Yorker. He woke to texts from his agent: “I’m so sorry. ... Are you awake? ... I’m so sorry.” 

Lorne Michaels tried to get ahead of the scandal, calling Yang to make sure he knew what was erupting in front of them. “I don’t need you to be the poster child for racial harmony,” Michaels assured him.

Getting ahead of it himself, Yang texted Gillis. That prompted a call back from Gillis, who apologized to Yang for the furor. “I ended the call by saying, ‘I guess I’ll just see you at work,’” Yang says. “He laughed and said, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then they announced that he was fired.”

It was the first time that Yang’s tenure on Saturday Night Live left him feeling “incidental to this big national story about cancel culture,” but it wouldn’t be the last. 

A few seasons later, internet sleuths (okay, Cracked was on the case as well) were inspecting Yang’s posture and placement on stage when embattled Dave Chappelle showed up for a surprise visit. While Yang undeniably appeared disgruntled that night, “I was just uncomfortable on other people’s behalf,” he said. “It wasn’t this big protest.” 

A month later saw the return of Gillis, inexplicably the host of the show that fired him for his hateful rhetoric. (Gillis’ growing popularity, at least in part, resulted from disgruntled fans protesting political correctness in comedy.) Once again, says The New Yorker, social media scrutinized Yang for signs of uneasiness or distress. “Again, he felt like a character in a culture-war pageant: the ‘woke scold.’” 

That makes Yang a singular presence in SNL’s history. “It’s taught me about my place on the show being kind of strange and unique,” he said. “I never expected to be a Nora Dunn being furious that an Andrew Dice Clay is there.” (Dunn famously sat out Clay’s hosting effort. “I was very familiar with his work,” she said in SNL oral history Live From New York. “He had a routine about sticking a woman’s head in the toilet, fucking her up the ass and then telling her to make some eggs. Where’s the joke?” Dunn believes her protest was the reason she wasn’t asked back for the following season. “I was very hurt by it,” she said. “I felt betrayed.”)

Despite all of the controversies, none of his own making, Yang still appreciates his SNL experience. “I hope this is not the Stockholm syndrome talking,” he says, “but it is still a great place to work.”