This Friday, comedian Shane Gillis returned to host the SNL nearly five years after being fired from the show. It was back in 2019, when Gillis was just hired for the show, but just after a week, some of the old offensive comments went viral, leading the makers of SNL to fire him.
Comedian, who went from there to co-host a popular podcast “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast” and started Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs on Netflix in 2023, returned to host the SNL this Friday and keep reading as we disclose how it went for Gillis.
Gillis chose to start the monologue with the news of him getting fired years ago from the show, suggesting the audience not Google him up if they don’t know him already.
He said,
Most of you probably have no idea who I am. I was actually—I was fired from this show a while ago. But, you know, don’t look that up, please. If you don’t know who I am, please don’t Google that. It’s fine. Don’t even worry about it.
From there on, he went on to joke about how every little boy is his mom’s gay best friend, and later brought in Down syndrome in his jokes. He said that some of the Down syndrome people he knows are some of the happiest people he knows, joking that they don’t have to worry about the elections.
His monologue filled with homophobic, down syndrome jokes did not exactly make the audience laugh out loud, as there were moments when the comic said that he expected a joke to get a louder laugh.
In his words,
This place is extremely well lit. I can see everyone not enjoying it.
This was indeed a befitting response to the comic, who is well popular among the audience for his remarkable offensive comments he dropped years ago in a podcast.
Gillis monologues mainly circled around races and Down syndrome. He joked about his sister adopting three black kids, and he also talked about having a niece with Down syndrome.
He talked about how his family had started a coffee shop where people with Down syndrome could work, and there were more jokes about white and black kids.
Anyhow, after knowing about Gillis previous racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks, his monologue at SNL seemed a bit cynical.
As the audience reacted lightly to his jokes, the comic also seemed a bit uncomfortable with his monologues as time went by.
After Gillis was fired from SNL in 2019, executive producer Lorne Michaels released the statement,
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 a 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.
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