Bowen Yang Says He and Shane Gillis Bonded Over ‘Being Used’ During ‘Saturday Night Live’ Scandal
Contrary to what some conservative comedy fans may believe, Bowen Yang has never gotten a fellow Saturday Night Live cast member fired, no matter what slurs they used or how many times they would go on to host the show.
Next Friday, Saturday Night Live will celebrate the six-year anniversary of the day on which three 30 Rock legends made it onto the show’s cast: Yang, Chloe Fineman and Shane Gillis. Then, on the following Tuesday, Lorne Michaels will mourn the six-year anniversary of the day he caved in to pressure from NBC and fired Gillis, whose past use of homophobic and anti-Asian slurs on his comedy podcast had resurfaced following the casting announcement and whipped up a social media firestorm.
Today, Gillis is one of the most popular stand-up comedians in the world, and Yang, whose status as the first ever Chinese-American Saturday Night Live cast member made him an unwillingly central figure in the Gillis scandal, couldn’t be happier for his shortest-tenured former co-star.
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During a recent appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, Yang described the “mutual respect” that he and Gillis share, revealing that they have since grown close due to how they each were assigned a side in the endless and destructive comedy culture war at a time that should have been the most joyous moment of their respective careers.
Yang has long maintained that, despite what social media may say about his relationship with Gillis, there is not, nor has there ever been, any bad blood between the two of them. Yang called the two-time SNL host and Joe-Rogan-adjacent comedy giant a “funny guy,” insisting that his sort-of-colleague isn't some kind of anti-woke, punch-down-comedy figurehead anymore than Yang is the chief of the P.C. police.
“Both of us have had to navigate being used,” Yang said of how he and Gillis navigated the dangerous terrain of the 2019 SNL hiring scandal. “I think there was like a recruitment going on either side of like, ‘If you like this guy, then this is what you stand for, and if you like this guy, then this is what you stand for.’ And I think both of us are probably a little more dimensional than that.”
As Yang explained in a New Yorker profile last year, he was one of the last people to find out about the firestorm engulfing both him and Gillis, learning about it in a series of frantic texts from his agent. Both Michaels and Gillis called Yang in the following hours, and Yang says that Gillis was profusely apologetic in their brief, amicable talk. “I ended the call by saying, ‘I guess I’ll just see you at work,’” Yang said of his conversation with his wouldn’t-be cast mate. “He laughed and said, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then they announced that he was fired.”
Unfortunately for both Yang and Gillis, and despite the complete lack of personal animosity between them, the two comedians were on opposite sides of a culture war issue in which comedy fans ascribed the role of the hyper-sensitive woke-scold to Yang while painting Gillis as a Rob-Schneider-level “you can’t say anything anymore” right-wing hack. Even today, with the SNL scandal so far in the rearview mirror of Gillis’ meteoric rise, some of his fans are still mad at Yang for supposedly kicking Gillis off of the show on which he would have been a terrible fit, judging by his two hosting stints.
Meanwhile, Fineman is about to celebrate six years of nobody asking her a goddamn thing about Gillis. She and Yang should split a cake.
