The SNL Firing That Left Lorne Michaels Furious

Plenty of people have been fired from “Saturday Night Live” across the shows 50-year history. Whether it was Norm Macdonald being let go in the middle of a season because he refused to stop telling O.J. Simpson jokes or Chris Farley being sent off during one of the show’s more tumultuous periods in the ’90s, “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels has seen plenty of comedians come and go. However, only one person has ever been fired from “SNL” before they ever got to debut on the show. 

Comedian Shane Gillis was hired for “Saturday Night Live” in September 2019, and he was meant to join the cast as a featured player for the show’s 45th season, along with Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman. However, after some racist and homophobic remarks came to light from “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” which Gillis co-hosts with fellow comedian Matt McCusker, NBC and “SNL” parted ways with Gillis before the season even started. 

During the milestone 50th season of “SNL,” showrunner and creator Lorne Michaels has been intermittently conducting interviews with some major media outlets about the show’s legacy and the historical new season. While speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Michaels revealed that he was not happy about the firing of Gillis at the time:

“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world. I was angry. I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing. That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”

Earlier this year, while talking about the firing of Shane Gillis, Lorne Michaels also told The Hollywood Reporter, “It was like a mania. And the velocity of cancellation — and lots of people deserved to not be liked — it just became not quite the Reign of Terror, but it was like you’re judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, ‘Are they any good at the thing they do?'”

I’ll be the first to push back against Michaels and remind him that these were not things he had said years earlier. These were comments on podcasts from within the past year at that time, and regardless of whether they were being done as intentionally incendiary or inappropriate bits, they simply didn’t land that way, and that matters. But the comedy scene can be a perplexing arena for anyone from the outside looking in. Lots of comedians say intentionally offensive things just for the bit. In fact, when Gillis appeared on the podcast Tiger Belly in 2021, Asian comedian Bobby Lee even acknowledged that he was guilty of using certain unspecified slurs during live comedy shows. But this is when referring to friends and comedians he knows at the shows in question — and they’re in on the bit. Gillis wasn’t exactly in that position with the remarks that got him fired, though it could be argued there was some satire at play. Obviously it wasn’t good satire.

At the time, there were dozens of advertisers who were threatening to pull money from “SNL” if Shane Gillis wasn’t fired, and when that kind of financial turmoil is in the air, someone has to be held responsible. Gillis still came out on the other side with his career still intact, and some might argue that he’s better off having not done “SNL.” After all, he was eventually invited back to host “SNL” in season 49, his stand-up act has been very successful, including a special on Netflix, and he’s been utilizing an impressive Donald Trump impersonation for years — one of the reasons that he was probably hired at “SNL” to begin with before Alec Baldwin and James Austin Johnson would portray him. In fact, Gillis said that Michaels wanted to bring him in to play Trump for season 50, but he turned it down.

While I think it could be argued that Shane Gillis’ stand-up comedy has more bubbling beneath the surface than it might seem, especially to certain audiences who came to embrace him after he was fired for all the wrong reasons, you can’t deny that it would have taken attention away from “SNL” doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s hard to do a late-night sketch comedy series when everyone is distracted by a controversial cast member, and even though Lorne Michaels might have disliked the decision at the time, “SNL” and Shane Gillis are clearly better off without each other.