Ahead of the airing of the 12th episode of the 49th season of American comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL) on February 24th, it has been announced that controversial comedian Shane Gillis will return to host. The announcement has sparked some controversy online, as Gillis had previously been fired from the show’s cast in 2019 after footage of him making racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments surfaced on social media.
Gillis was fired from SNL before he even had the chance to make an appearance on the show or contribute to writing for it after audio from a previous podcast emerged in which he made several distasteful jokes. A spokesperson for the show stated at the time, “After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL. 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 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.”
In response to this, Gillis stated, “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. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.” SNL’s current season began in October 2021, and Gillis will be hosting the 12th episode of the season, following on from recent guest hosts including Dakota Johnson, Jacob Elordi, Emma Stone, and Adam Driver.
On the most recent episode of SNL, host Ayo Edebiri acknowledged jokes she’d made in a 2020 podcast about J-Lo in a sketch on the show. In January, the show also poked fun at the then-US President Donald Trump’s comments that suggested sick voters should still show up and vote for him, even if they died afterward. Impersonator James Austin Johnson said, “My people love me. They’ve got the old people waiting in the snow for two hours to vote for Trump. ‘Oh darling, I’m dying. I gotta do one last thing. I gotta vote for Trump.’ We just need them to stay alive until November. Stay alive until November. Just pull that lever and drop dead. Why? Because I am sent by God and God has a plan for me, or whatever.
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