Bowen Yang Responds After ‘SNL’ Extra Blames Him for Shane Gillis’ Firing

Bowen Yang gave a resounding “I don’t think so, honey” to a Saturday Night Live extra’s accusation that he got comedian Shane Gillis fired from the NBC show.

The social media flap started after one Michelle Best commented on an Instagram post promoting Gillis’ return as host tonight, Saturday, March 1.

“Can we acknowledge that Bowen Yang b*tched him off the show, and he’s the bigger man to come host after being unfairly ditched [because] of a whiny queen,” Best wrote in a comment. “SNL fired him as a hater. He’s not. He’s very kind and has smart humor and stands up to bullying. Good for him!”

Yang, a star of SNL since 2019, replied on Instagram, writing, “Didn’t do any of this, but I wrote the sketch you were a background actor in.”

Best appears to have played a small part in the 2019 SNL sketch “Fashion Coward,” Entertainment Weekly reports.

Gillis, meanwhile, was hired as a a featured SNL player in 2019 — alongside Yang and costar Chloe Fineman — and fired after his past racist and homophobic slurs resurfaced.

At the time, Gillis offered a semblance of a public apology, saying he was “a comedian who pushes boundaries” and “sometimes miss[es]” and that he was “happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.”

Yang told The New Yorker in 2024 that Gillis called him to personally apologize during the scandal.

And SNL creator Lorne Michaels told The Wall Street Journal in 2024 that it was NBC’s decision to fire Gillis.

“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels said. “I was angry. I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing. … [The call to fire Gillis] was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”

Gillis returned to host SNL in 2024 and does so again tonight, Saturday, March 1, at 11:30/10:30c.

Saturday Night Live, Saturdays, 11:30/10:30c, NBC

From TV Guide Magazine

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