Saturday Night Live recently garnered controversy when Shane Gillis, one of its three new cast members for the upcoming season, was discovered to have made racist and homophobic remarks in his podcast in 2018. Gillis’ response to the backlash against his casting was that as a comedian, he often “pushes boundaries” and takes “risks” and that he never intended to hurt anyone, but was happy to apologize to anyone actually offended by him. On Sept. 16, four days after the announcement of his casting, Gillis was fired from the show.
This event once again started a conversation about whether public figures should be held accountable for previous offensive or otherwise problematic remarks, and whether comedians in particular should be held to a different standard because their craft often involves “pushing boundaries.”
While I do understand that comedians often need to be edgy and subversive to captivate their audience, I don’t think that there is ever an excuse for being so blatantly insulting to a particular group, especially a marginalized group, as Gillis was to Chinese Americans and gay people. Building your routine off of decades-old stereotypes and slurs is only “pushing boundaries” because those words and ideas were generally deemed unacceptable many years ago—as they should be, because they are extremely offensive and hurtful.
Regardless of whether past remarks were justified, there is also a general sentiment that their speakers should be allowed to grow and change and earn forgiveness, rather than immediately removed from job opportunities. While I do think this idea has potential value, it rarely comes to fruition because Gillis and those in similar situations often fail to properly atone for their harmful statements.
If Gillis had apologized directly to the communities that he had mocked and demonstrated an understanding of why his remarks were offensive then he may have been met with more sympathy; instead, like most actors and comedians, he responded with only a few sentences quickly written on the Notes app on his iPhone and then shared on his social media page. Usually these types of responses at least attempt to seriously reflect on why the past statements were wrong and/or explain that the person in question has learned and grown since then, but Gillis’ didn’t even do that.
Celebrities like Gillis are often defended as being victims of some kind of “cancel culture” rooted in mob mentality that instantly ruins the career of a performer or creator in the entertainment industry based on any “mistakes” (i.e. offensive or otherwise problematic statements) they made in the past. However, Gillis’ career has still ultimately benefited from this; he was reportedly already using this controversy as part of his standup routine on September 18 and will most likely go on to have a solid career due to his new infamy as that comedian who was “too edgy” for SNL—not to mention the support from those in the industry who think that he was wrongfully fired.
In fact, “cancel culture” never actually exists in cases like this. Fellow comedian Sarah Silverman has spoken out multiple times about the unfairness of her being “cancelled” for wearing blackface in a 2007 sketch that she thoroughly regrets, but the only consequence was her losing a single film role, and her career and status appear to be untouched otherwise. In December 2018, Kevin Hart stepped down from hosting the Oscars due to criticism of previous homophobic tweets, and yet has seen no decline in his career whatsoever since then, and no public memory of his misdeeds—or at least, none that actually affects his popularity in Hollywood. And in July 2018, director James Gunn was fired by Disney from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for past tweets that made pedophilic jokes (which he, like Gillis, attributed to being “provocative” at the time for comedic purposes); not only was he eventually rehired by Disney, but the situation caused him to receive opportunities from other major studios that he would not have otherwise.
The point is not that people like Silverman, Hart, Gunn and Gillis necessarily all deserve to be booted from the industry and never seen again; it’s that I’ve seen too many people both in real life and online defend them as victims of some dangerous, radical, hyper-woke culture that in reality is doing zero long-term harm to them and their careers.
The Shane Gillis controversy should ideally be teaching comedians that making blatantly offensive comments is never acceptable and will have serious consequences for their careers. Instead, because of how the entertainment industry currently works, it fits a familiar pattern: if you’ve made comments in the past that target and insult marginalized groups, then yes, people will find them and make an uproar; and yes, you may lose a job opportunity or two. But no matter how you choose to apologize and make amends, the vast majority will forget about it after a few days and your career will ultimately be just fine, perhaps even better than before, because virtually no one in the industry actually cares.