Lorne Michaels Still Thinks Everyone Overreacted to ‘SNL’ Hiring Shane Gillis

It’s been five years since stand-up star Shane Gillis spent a total of five days as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, but Lorne Michaels still can’t believe that the show’s fanbase didn’t want to spend every Saturday night watching Gillis awkwardly mumble slurs at his co-stars.

The ascension of Saturday Night Live’s shortest-tenured cast member from podcasting microcelebrity to bona fide streaming star following the events of his 2019 hired-to-fired speedrun makes us wonder whether Gillis could have accomplished nearly as much in his already-impressive comedy career had SNL retained him through its 45th season and beyond. Between his Netflix series Tires, his streaming special Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs and his deification among the vaguely conservative anti-woke comedy crowd, Gillis is currently in command of a larger following than those of all but the most all-time-beloved SNL cast members, and it’s hard to imagine an alternate reality where the generally left-leaning SNL fan community ever embraces him with as much fervor as do his friends in the manosphere.

Frankly, getting fired from SNL in the midst of a massive media controversy might have been the biggest break of Gillis’ career — and Michaels’ biggest regret going on 50 years as the SNL don. In a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Michaels, who has continued to keep Gillis close both on SNL and in other projects, lamented how “political correctness” has harmed his show, saying of the 2019 backlash to the Gillis hiring, “The overreaction to it was so stunning.”

Yeah, well, so were the slurs.

Gillis came up when THR asked Michaels for his thoughts on how political correctness impacts SNL in 2024, but the comedy kingmaker insisted on returning to 2019, remarking, “We had a bad time when I added Shane Gillis to the cast. He got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier,” noting of what he considered to be the “overreaction,” “The velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show.” 

For context, just a year earlier in a 2018 episode of Gillis’ show Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast that Gillis had attempted to scrub from the internet prior to his SNL hiring, Gillis briefly played the character of a racist 1940s landlord living in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood for a bit, using an ugly ethnic slur for comic effect. In a separate podcast episode from that year, Gillis and his co-host Matt McCusker ranked other popular comedians and artists based on their race, gender and sexual orientation, calling Judd Apatow and Chris Gethard “white f****t comics” and “fucking gayer than ISIS.” 

In response to the unearthing of clips that Gillis himself tried to hide, Gillis tweeted out, “I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries,” adding the defensive almost-apology, “If you go through my 10 years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of bad misses. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.” 

Four days later, Michaels fired Gillis from SNL. 

“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,’” Michaels told THR of the controversy. “When he came back to the show last year (to host), we saw, ‘Oh right, he’s really talented, and he would’ve been really good for us.’” However, Michaels’ assessment of Gillis’ SNL hosting appearance in February earlier this year doesn’t quite match up with the critical and fan consensus on the return. In fact, almost everyone besides Michaels saw Gillis nervously stumble through cringey sketches while struggling to deliver his lines clearly and with any degree of comedic timing. 

Still, Michaels looks back on that poorly received SNL episode as a sad reminder of what could have been, saying of the Gillis scandal, “It was like a mania.” Michaels added of the cultural moment in 2019, “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?’”

In Gillis’ case, he is, inarguably, a much better “canceled” comic than he is a sketch performer on SNL. All of Gillis’ attempts at reaching a “mainstream” audience have been awkward and stilted as he struggles to restrain himself from calling everything and everyone around him “gay” on shows like SNL and Hot Ones, but his appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience and Kill Tony continue to dazzle the anti-woke comedy crowd who actually prefer a liberal use of slurs. 

SNL, however, simply isn’t a place where Gillis’ brand of comedy can succeed, and it’s probably best for everyone involved that his time as part of the cast was so historically brief. After all, the manosphere doesn’t make its stars read off of cue cards.