Shane Gillis has reportedly been selected to host an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, five years after he was fired from the show for using racial slurs.
The comedian is set to host the February 24th show, where 21 Savage will be performing as a musical guest. SNL initially hired Gillis in 2019 but gave him a pink slip before appearing in an episode thanks to a YouTube video in which he used a racial slur on the Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast surfaced online. In the since-deleted video, Gillis mocked a Chinese accent and used several homophobic slurs.
"After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL," said an SNL spokesperson at the time of Gillis' firing. "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."
The statement continued, "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."
Gillis responded in his own words, claiming he pushes buttons as a comedian and acknowledged that some of his jokes won't hit the mark. Because of that, he was willing to apologize to anyone offended by his jokes.
"I'm a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss," he said. "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."
Since being let go from the long-running sketch comedy show, Gillis gained popularity on the stand-up circuit. His first comedy special, Shane Gillis: Live in Austin, was released on YouTube in 2021 and he followed that up with Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs, which was unleashed on Netflix in September 2023.
