‘Saturday Night Live’ Drops Controversial New Cast Member Shane Gillis

Variety reports that comedian Shane Gillis has been let go by Saturday Night Live.

It was first announced on September 12 that Gillis, along with fellow comedians Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman, was joining the venerable comedy institution last Thursday (September 12) as a featured cast member. Almost immediately, this created an uproar based on tweets from journalist Seth Simons, who noted that the Philly based stand-up comedian had a history of making racist comments on podcasts.

Vulture also reported that he had been banned from at least one Philadelphia comedy club “because of racist, homophobic, and sexist things he’s said on and offstage.”

After a weekend of celebrities and comedy fans alike speaking out about Gillis’ behavior (and at least one hand across the aisle moment from Presidential candidate Andrew Yang), SNL announced that they will be parting ways with Gillis, making his tenure the shortest for any cast-member in the history of the show.

A Saturday Night Live spokesperson released the following statement on behalf of SNL producer Lorne Michaels:

“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 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.”

Shane Gillis also released a statement in the wake of the news on Twitter:

Saturday Night Live will return on September 28th with host Woody Harrelson and musical guest Billie Eilish.

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