During Ayo Edebiri’s February 3 episode of SNL, the show announced that 36-year-old comedian, podcaster, and Bud Light pitch man Shane Gillis was slated to make his SNL hosting debut on February 24. Gillis has released two popular comedy specials, 2021’s Live in Austin on YouTube and 2023’s Beautiful Dogs on Netflix, and the podcast he co-hosts with fellow comedian Matt McCusker, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, is currently the top podcast on Patreon in terms of subscribers. In addition to his podcast and stand-up work, Gillis writes and performs sketch comedy alongside comedian John McKeever; their YouTube channel, Gilly and Keeves, has more than 746,000 subscribers. If you don’t know Gillis but his name sounds familiar in an “Oh, that guy!†type of way, it’s probably because he was fired from the SNL cast in 2019 before he even appeared on the show.
Given his history with the NBC sketch-comedy series and offensive comments, the news that he’ll host has been met with controversy. So what’s the actual deal? With Gillis’s SNL episode fast-approaching, we’ve put together a guide to help you sort through the noise.
What’s This Guy’s Deal With SNL?
On September 12, 2019, SNL announced that, along with Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang, Gillis would be joining the cast. Hours later, freelance comedy journalist Seth Simons surfaced a clip from Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast featuring Gillis and McCusker lazily riffing on Chinatown, its restaurants, and their inability to process its Chinese-ness. Using the voice of a real-estate developer or government official, Gillis says, “Let the fucking ch*nks live there.†Later, he discusses eating at Chinatown restaurants with his girlfriend, calling noodles “nooders†while using a mocking stereotypical accent.
Other examples of Gillis using racist, sexist, and homophobic language emerged throughout the day. By September 13, the story had grown into a full-fledged controversy that dominated the discourse, and Gillis became a top trending topic on Twitter. Future SNL host Simu Liu, for example, spoke out against Gillis’s hiring on Twitter, while former cast member and host Norm Macdonald tweeted Gillis his support.
On the evening of September 13, Gillis addressed the controversy via a since-deleted tweet. “I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss. If you go through my 10 years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of bad misses,†he wrote. “I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said. My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.â€
Gillis later claimed during a 2021 Joe Rogan Experience interview that Lorne Michaels told him it would all be fine once they got to the first episode of the season. Later it was revealed that the lack of support was coming from the network, not Michaels. “NBC was in something of a panic,†Michaels told The New Yorker in 2022. “It was, like, ‘They’re going to boycott these sponsors!’â€
Four days after his hiring, SNL announced Gillis would not be joining the cast after all. “After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided he will not be joining SNL,†the show said in a 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 is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to standard.â€
Gillis posted his own statement on Twitter after the SNL announcement. “It feels ridiculous for comedians to be making serious public statements but here we are,†he wrote. “I’m a comedian who was funny enough to get SNL. That can’t be taken away. Of course I wanted an opportunity to prove myself at SNL, but I understand it would be too much of a distraction. I respect the decision they made. I’m honestly grateful for the opportunity. I was always a mad tv guy anyway.â€
What’s He Been Up to Since Then?
The press generated by Gillis’s SNL debacle turned out to be a boon for his stand-up career. Where his previous credits (Comedy Central’s Up Next, JFL New Faces) had done little to help him cultivate his own dedicated audience, his firing led to name recognition and a fan base instantly sympathetic to what they viewed as his unjust punishment. Respected comedy legends like Macdonald and Bill Burr spoke out in support of Gillis on large platforms in the immediate aftermath of SNL’s announcement, exposing him to bigger audiences. Soon after, Gillis hit the road as a touring headliner, doubled down on stand-up as his primary focus, and began playing progressively larger venues.
Since before his SNL firing, Gillis has been a fixture within a community of popular comedy podcasters loosely united by a focus on freewheeling conversation, broad skepticism of political correctness, and sometimes libertarian politics. These podcast appearances ramped up in the months leading up to and directly following the release of Gillis’s stand-up special Live in Austin, helping propel it to its current count of more than 23 million views. Gillis has hit all the major tentpoles: Theo Von’s This Past Weekend, The Legion of Skanks, and most notably The Joe Rogan Experience. On the latter, Gillis demurred at the idea that being fired from SNL had made him a martyr. “I don’t want to be a victim, I want to be a comedian,†he said. “I don’t want to come on and do stuff where I’m, like, ‘Yeah, it was unfair how I was treated.’ It’s like, No, I get it. I understand why I was treated that way. I said wild shit. I’m going to keep saying wild shit.†(True to his word, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast has continued to be a platform for “wild shit,†including frequent guests who deny the Holocaust.)
Gillis has parlayed all of this momentum into continued success as a stand-up, podcaster, and sketch comedian. Among other accomplishments, he toured arenas as part of Kreischer’s touring Fully Loaded stand-up festival in 2022, released his second stand-up special, Beautiful Dogs, on Netflix in 2023 to broadly positive reviews from audiences and critics, and is set to headline New York’s historic Radio City Music Hall in March.
What’s His Stand-up Like?
No comedian working today is more successful at playing the fence than Gillis. “I’m a bit of a history buff,†he begins one joke from Beautiful Dogs, before pausing to add that this is code for “early-onset Republican.†It’s a Rorschach as much as it is a joke: Liberals hear Gillis skewering the Republican obsession with tradition and rhetorically equating membership in their party to a mental illness like dementia; conservatives hear Gillis saying he’s on a historically informed, inevitable road to joining their team. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, and Gillis does it in four seconds.
Much of Gillis’s comedy follows a similar template. In Live in Austin, he paints a picture of his dad as a compulsive Fox News viewer foaming at the mouth in search of one cogent talking point he can shoehorn into every future conversation, then equates that to the behavior of liberals doomscrolling Twitter. (In both instances: “Fucking Mr. Potato Head is Trans?!â€) He’s not apolitical, but he positions himself as a conscientious objector to the culture war, content to stand to the side and poke fun at the corniness of its most earnest combatants. He does a dead-on impression of Donald Trump that is equal parts reverent and mocking; for Gillis, it doesn’t matter whether he was a good president so much because he’s funny. (Gillis met Trump in July 2023.)
Onstage, Gillis plays the part of an oafish Everyman. He’s constantly calling the audience “dude,†flashing knowing grins, and beginning sentences with “No …†to add a caveat to something he just said. His biographical material — everything from tragicomic bits about his sister’s opioid addiction to quick asides about “crushing milk†while visiting his parents — paints a picture of his upbringing as just blue collar enough to liberate him from some of society’s most stringent politically correct mores. The effect has afforded him the kind of audience goodwill that not all comedians get, which is bolstered by the fact that at least some of his audience is made up of people who flocked to him in the wake of his SNL firing to see him live up to his offensive reputation. His dicey material about people with Down syndrome plays better with audiences because he gestures at his own face and points out he inarguably looks like he was born with the condition himself. He gets away with using slurs as punch lines because he convinces audiences they don’t come from a place of hate, just indifference — plus, as he frames it, he’s halfway making fun of the people who would sincerely use those slurs anyway. The closest comparison point of Gillis’s sensibility, for better and for worse, is Louis C.K. (Gillis and C.K. are good friends.)
Gillis’s fans extend beyond Burr and C.K.: Sam Jay has called him the best comedian working, and Jerrod Carmichael is also a vocal supporter. Where other comedians of his ilk tend to divide audiences along moral or ideological lines, Gillis frequently brings them together.
Why Does SNL Want Him to Host?
For the same reasons Lorne Michaels wanted him on the cast in the first place.
Gillis is not an aberration but a culmination of certain trends at SNL, mixed with some underlying principles. In recent years, Michaels has leaned more and more into stand-up, both for potential cast members and hosts. Some of the stand-ups who have joined the cast over the last decade, like Leslie Jones and Pete Davidson, are more remembered for stand-up-style direct addresses during “Weekend Update†than anything they did in sketches. After the 2016 election, Dave Chappelle hosted with no TV shows or movies to promote; over the next season and a half, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., Kumail Nanjiani, Donald Glover, Amy Schumer, and John Mulaney hosted. The creative and popular success of Mulaney’s 2018 episode created an expectation that when a stand-up reaches a level of Lorne-approved cultural relevance, they can host. As a result, you get Bill Burr, Jerrod Carmichael, and Nate Bargatze hosting — and four more Mulaney episodes.
Bargatze, who by most accounts crushed his turn as host in October 2023, is instructive. Though his act tends to be apolitical (these days, that is — in 2016, he had a joke about why he loves Trump), Bargatze represents a “red-state appeal†archetype that Michaels has always been on the lookout for to contrast any perception that the show is too urbane. Michaels denied hiring Gillis specifically to appeal to conservatives, but he acknowledged in The New Yorker piece that Gillis offers the show a different perspective: “He’s from a part of the world that should also have a voice.â€
It’s not a coincidence that Gillis’s hosting stint is happening in an election year. “The show’s tried really hard to not just be a partisan voice, but to be clear-headed about it,†Michaels told Vulture in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Michaels’s agenda is to appear as to not have an agenda. The show has always had left- and right-wing politicians as hosts or drop-ins, not in spite of the state of polarization but because of it. Michaels wants SNL to be a sort of funhouse mirror of the culture and, as such, to reflect the whole country — or at least the whole country that interests him. But more than anything, Gillis is hosting because he was fired and because Michaels lives for the drama.