While speaking with comedian Shane Gillis on the latest episode of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Rogan accused Saturday Night Live of stealing jokes, calling the show “a den of thieves.”
“By all accounts, that place is a den of thieves,” Rogan told Gillis, who was fired from SNL in 2019 after past derogatory and racist remarks he made on his podcast were made public. “You hear Jim Breuer’s account of the climate in that place and it’s horrific. They’re all stealing from writers, they’re stealing from performers. If you’re a writer and you submit your packages, the higher-up writers will steal your shit, according to Breuer.”
Rogan continued, “If you submit a package, they own that package, even if they don’t hire you. So if you have some great premises, they decide they’re just going to take your premises and not hire you, they own all those bits.”
Rogan’s comments come four months after Jim Breuer visited Joe’s podcast and opened up about his time on SNL, where he was a cast member from 1995 to ’98. Breuer recalled multiple incidents where other castmates, writers, and producers would steal or cut his material. “Everyone’s at each other’s throats. It’s like politics,” Breuer told Rogan.
Gillis was fired from SNL in 2019, just four days after he was hired, when video surfaced of him using racial slurs in a 2018 podcast.
“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL,” an SNL spokesperson said at the time. “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 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.”
