Shane Gillis has been announced as the next host of Saturday Night Live, alongside musical guest 21 Savage.
This comes years after the comedian was quickly fired from the sketch comedy show in 2019 after using racial and homophobic slurs on a podcast.
Gillis had been one of three new SNL castmembers that were cast on the show at the time. But then he came under fire when he could be heard using a racial slur in a since-deleted 2018 video posted on the YouTube channel Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast.
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“Chinatown’s fucking nuts,” Gillis said in the video. “Let the fucking ch—s live there.” Gillis was also seen mimicking a Chinese accent and mocking Chinese restaurants in the footage.
Then additional audio resurfaced from another 2018 episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, where Gillis and co-host Matt McCusker could be heard ranking how funny comedians were by race and using homophobic slurs.
At the time of Gillis’ firing in 2019, a rep for SNL creator Lorne Michaels said in a statement, “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.”
The statement continued, “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.”
Gillis was announced as host during SNL‘s show on Feb. 3, with host Ayo Edebiri.
