“Saturday Night Live” is having a monumental year. The iconic sketch comedy show is in its 50th season, and the anniversary celebration has been years in the making.
In the past few months, features have been published in Vulture, Elle and People; commercial sponsorships have aired with CeraVe, T-Mobile and Volkswagen, and a four-part historical docuseries (“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night”) and full-length music documentary (“Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music”) were released on Peacock.
The build-up culminated in a massive homecoming for “SNL” cast, crew and honorary affiliates earlier this month as they presented a live anniversary special celebrating half a century of the show and its impact.
It was an event of escapism, three or so hours to simply revel in nostalgia and joy.
Then, the show announced that stand-up comedian Shane Gillis would host the first show post-anniversary. As a longtime “SNL” fan, the cheer dissipated, and reality seeped back in.
Gillis was cast on the show in 2019 but fired four days later after clips of him using racist, sexist and homophobic language, including a racial slur for Chinese people, surfaced on the internet.
“I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss,” Gillis wrote in a post on Twitter at the time that has since been deleted. “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. My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.”
Even after Gillis’ public dismissal from the show, he still stood by his controversial comments. “I definitely wouldn’t have changed what we did on our podcast,” Gillis told comedian Theo Von on his podcast in 2021. “That’s how I got to New York.”
Although he never made it onto the show as a cast member, he was invited to host an episode in 2024 and is now hosting again almost exactly one year later.
The choice to invite him back so quickly is bizarre, considering his first appearance was tepidly received by critics, with NPR saying that “viewers got an OK episode that, more than anything, might leave them wondering why a middling talent like Gillis got tapped to host the show in the first place.”
With Gillis’ hosting stints,…
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