‘Saturday Night Live’ Replaced Leslie Jones With A Racist And Homophobic White Comic
Last month, Leslie Jones confirmed that she has decided to end her run at Saturday Night Live to pursue other opportunities. Her departure means the number of Black women on the show's writing staff dropped back down to zero.
Since her departure, the long-running live sketch comedy series has announced three new cast members for its upcoming 45th season, one being stand-up comic Shane Gillis. Mere hours after the announcement, freelance writer Seth Simons dug into Gillis' past and found a series of racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. In fact, Simons didn't have to dig very deep at all: many of the comments are from one year ago.
A clip from Gillis' podcast, Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast, shows Gillis and his co-host, Matt McCusker, making tons of offensive comments about Chinese people and mocking their accents.
In the clip, while referring to Chinatown, Gillis says, "Why do the f*****g ch**ks live there?" In another clip from the same episode, he continued to show his ignorance, joking about being annoyed by Asian people who try to learn English by adding, "Nice racism. Good racism."
Take a look, below:
In another episode of the podcast, published in May 2019, Gillis and his co-host proved that they not only included racist content in their program, but also some that are severely homophobic and sexist.
Beginning at the 12:00 mark, the two discussed comedians who use a more confessional style and mocked them by using homophobic slurs, calling them "white f***ot comics" and f*****g gayer than ISIS."
They also strangely ranked other comedians earlier in the episode by race, gender and sexual orientation, claiming, "White chicks are literally the bottom," before adding, "Ali Wong is making it so Asian chicks are funnier than white chicks."
Since seeing the uproar surrounding these not-so-ancient comments he made, Gillis took to Instagram on Thursday night to issue a statement "apologizing" for his words.
"I'm a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss," he wrote. "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 risk."
Um... What in the world was what?
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Nevertheless, Gillis is off to a rocky start in his SNL journey. See how Twitter has responded to his casting and his lazy attempt at an apology, below:
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