Bowen Yang Roasts ‘Saturday Night Live’ Extra Who Says He Got Shane Gillis Fired

Bowen Yang isn’t the reason why Shane Gillis is simply a Saturday Night Live host instead of a Saturday Night Live cast member, but he’s also not afraid of becoming some mouthy extra’s 13th reason.

This weekend, SNL’s most notoriously short-tenured alumnus will return to the sketch show to make another attempt at adjusting his non-NBC-friendly sense of humor for a much more “mainstream” audience than his usual crowd of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast listeners. Back on September 16, 2019, just four days after Lorne Michaels announced Gillis as one of three new featured cast members along with Yang and Chloe Fineman, SNL fired the stand-up star in response to the backlash regarding Gillis’ past use of anti-Asian slurs on the aforementioned podcast. However, in the years since the biggest scandal of Gillis’ career, Michaels and his empire have made sure to stay close friends with Gillis and keep the messy breakup as amicable as possible.

As Gillis prepares for his second hosting stint on SNL following the 2019 controversy, some of his fans have refused to take the “no hard feelings” stance on the split that Gillis himself has maintained for over five years, and in the comment section of an Instagram post about Gillis’ upcoming performance, one supporter with very loose ties to SNL even went so far as to accuse Yang of causing the drama. 

Yang then swiftly reminded his hater that a background actors are supposed to stay silent. 

Actress Michelle Best briefly appeared in the 2019 Yang-written SNL sketch “Fashion Coward,” and although the show isn't listed as a credit on her IMDb page, the experience clearly left her with the impression that she is an expert on the behind-the-scenes drama from that season and could pass judgment on whichever “whiny queen” she wished. 

Unfortunately for Best, both Gillis and Yang have long maintained that there was not — nor has there ever been — any personal acrimony between them. In fact, when the offending podcast clips that led to Gillis’ firing first went viral, Gillis called Yang to apologize for the uncomfortable position in which the show’s first-ever Chinese-American cast member found himself during what should have been the most exciting moment of his career. “I ended the call by saying, ‘I guess I’ll just see you at work,’” Yang recalled of the conversation with his would-be cast mate in a New Yorker profile back in September. “He laughed and said, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then they announced that he was fired.”

Not only has Yang never harbored resentment toward Gillis over the casting controversy, but the very suggestion that someone who had worked at SNL for barely a few hours could ever force Michaels to fire a comedian whom he loves more than most people in show business love their own children is absolutely laughable. Not that Best understands much about humor. If she did, maybe Yang would have written her a line.