SNL Fires Shane Gillis

Stand-up comic Shane Gillis will not be joining Saturday Night after all. Following backlash over past racial slurs, the NBC sketch comedy show cut loose Gillis, who was announced as a new feature player last week.

“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL,” said a spokesperson for Lorne Michaels. “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. 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.”