Lorne Michaels thinks the controversy around his 2019 hiring of Shane Gillis was a 'stunning' 'overreaction'
It’s been a big week for Shane Gillis, and he didn’t even have to lift a finger for it. Earlier this week, he was featured as a supporting player inat the same time. But Gillis was fired almost immediately after critics resurfaced offensive jokes, including the use of slurs against Asian people. Now we’re getting the same story fromAsked if he’s more concerned about being politically correct now than when the show started in 1975, Michaels reflected on The Shane Gillis Incident as an example.
We had a bad time when I added Shane Gillis to the cast . He got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier and the overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show,” Michaels recalled. “It became a scandal and I go, ‘No, no, he’s just starting and he’s really funny and you don’t know how we’re going to use him.
Nevertheless, Michaels invited him back to host in February 2024, and in his opinion “we saw, ‘Oh right, he’s really talented, and he would’ve been really good for us.'” Michaels’ point about political correctness is that “everything became way too serious. It was like a mania.
It’s more about keeping it on course than anything else, and, obviously, I really love it. And every year there are more and more people that I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing,'” he explained to. “So, I don’t really have an answer; I just know that this is kind of what I do and as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it. There’s no immediate plan.
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