Shane Gillis seems to stir up controversy everywhere he goes, and yet, somehow, he’s still one of the most successful podcasters and comedians out there.
Gillis first made national headlines back in 2019 when he was fired from Saturday Night LiveSaturday Night Live before ever taking the stage as a cast member because of offensive comments he made on his podcast.
Despite that, he’s managed to score comedy specials, TV shows, and even multiple hosting gigs on SNL.
But who is the controversial comedian, and what led to him getting fired?
Who is Shane Gillis?
Gillis is a comedian, podcaster, and actor who found early success when he started doing stand-up comedy in 2012. In 2017, he started the podcast Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast with his co-host and fellow comedian Matt McCusker. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, the successful podcast was the most subscribed to Patreon account in 2024, wracking up more than 71,000 paying listeners.
After a controversy that led to his firing from SNL, Shane went on to put out multiple comedy specials, had a recurring role on Pete Davidson’s TV show Bupkis, and co-created and starred in the show Tires for Netflix, which has been renewed for a second season.
Gillis will also appear in the upcoming movie Easy Waltz — in a role that was originally written for Norm Macdonald prior to his death — and he stared in Bud Light’s Super Bowl LIX commercial.
Why was Shane Gillis fired from SNL?
Gillis was fired as a cast member on SNL in 2019 before his debut episode after a recent podcast episode resurfaced where the comic could be heard making racist remarks, NBC News reports.
Just days after it was announced that he was hired as a new cast member for season 45 of SNL, a clip of him using an anti-Asian slur and racist imitation of an Asian accent went viral.
The clip came from an episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast where the two hosts were “joking” about Chinatown. “Let the f------ ch---- live there,” Gillis said in the podcast.
In light of his racist “jokes,” Gillis was fired and never appeared as an SNL cast member. In an interview, he gave a weak apology for his offensive comments but said he planned to keep making taboo jokes.
"I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries,” he wrote on Twitter (now X). “I sometimes miss. If you go through my 10 years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of bad misses. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said."
A spokesperson for SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels told NBC News that they were unaware of his history of racist jokes when he was hired. “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 a 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,” the spokesperson said.
Gillis also faced backlash when listeners discovered he had used homophobic slurs during a bit on his podcast about “hot Southern boys” being sexually assaulted during the Civil War. On past episodes of his podcast, he can also be heard calling gay people "fa----ts" and transgender women "ladyboys."
Why was Shane Gillies asked to host SNL?
Years after getting canned before ever appearing on the show, Gillis hosted an episode of SNL in 2024, but his monologue went over like a lead balloon.
He mocked his dad for being a volunteer assistant girls’ high school basketball coach, talked about his relatives with Down syndrome, and compared spending time with his sister’s diverse family to “the craziest Uber pool you’ve ever been [in],” before making a bizarre gay “joke.”
“You remember when you were a little boy and you loved your mom, you thought she was the coolest? You remember when you were gay?” he asked. “Do you remember when you were just a gay little boy? Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend. There’s literally zero difference. I was gay for my mom.”
Despite his first appearance not being well received — critics said he “struggled” and “bombed” — he has been asked back and will host for the second time on March 1.
He may have been fired, but Michaels has stood up for the comedian and may be behind him being asked back twice. “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,” Micheals said according to Forbes, who also reported that the SNL creator and producer criticized people for “judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, ‘Are they any good at the thing they do?’”
Did Bowen Yang get Shane Gillis fired from SNL?
Bowen Yang, who is in his sixth season as an SNL cast member, started as a writer on the long-running comedy show before getting hired as a cast member at the same time as Gillis. Since Yang is the show’s first Chinese-American cast member and an out gay man, and Gillis has made both anti-Asian and homophobic “jokes,” it has led to people assuming Yang was behind Gillis being fired. But SNL creator Michaels has blamed the executives at the top for Gillis being asked to leave, Entertainment Weekly reports.
It’s been nearly seven years since Gillis was fired, but Yang is still being blamed. Just this week, ahead of Gillis returning to host SNL yet again, he clapped back at someone who took to social media to stir up the controversy again and place the blame at Yang’s feet — something the Las Culturistas host won’t put up with anymore.
Does Shane Gillis have a Netflix special?
In 2023, Gillis released his Netflix exclusive comedy special, Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs, which the New York Times called “dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.”
Shane Gillis will appear on SNL on March 1, 2024, on NBC or stream it on Peacock and Hulu.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.