There’s plenty of evidence that some form of “cancel culture” exists. The internet has paved the way for people more easily to band together for a cause, even to weaponize outrage, to get people fired or pushed out of certain circles.
Take, for instance, Kevin Hart’s disinvitation from the Oscars, or recently, the judge from the Brock Turner rape case getting fired from a job that had nothing to do with the judiciary. What about the author who decided not to publish his book because early reviewers complained that the bad guys were the wrong race?
The Left doesn’t have a monopoly on cancel culture, either. Disney fired (and later rehired) Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn after right-wingers shared some of his old tweets.
As much as reactionary “canceling” does exist, and does have real-life consequences, not every instance of public outrage amounts to an offshoot of cancel culture. Take, for instance, Shane Gillis’ firing from Saturday Night Live.
Conservatives were quick to cry cancel culture after Gillis, who was recently hired as a cast member on SNL, was sacked based on racist and derogatory comments on a podcast that journalists dug up.
As Variety summarizes: “In a widely-shared clip from ‘Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,’ Gillis and co-host Matt McClusker are discussing New York’s Chinatown when Gillis says, ‘Let the f—ing chinks live there.’ He later recalls a restaurant being ‘full of f—ing Chinee [sic] in there.'”
In addition to playing off Chinese stereotypes, he also used “gay” and “retard” as slurs, as well as the word “faggot.”
Should SNL have found this sooner? Yes. It took one journalist all of a few hours to find the videos. And it’s not like he was “resurfacing” tweets from the man’s teen years. These were extended comments from a podcast as recent as last year.
SNL had no responsibility to continue to employ Gillis, though perhaps it should have stuck to its guns. But Gillis’ apology appeared feeble; it employed the “my comedy missed the mark” excuse when his comments were neither spoken in a comedic setting nor explainable by “missing the mark.”
“I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries. I sometimes miss,” he said in a statement. “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. My intention is never to hurt anyone but I am trying to be the best comedian I can be and sometimes that requires risks.”
If he can’t apologize explicitly for some of his comments, he might not be the type of entertainer that SNL wants to represent its brand. The problem is not that Gillis messed up. It’s that he really isn’t sorry. If he had sincerely apologized, perhaps SNL could have kept him, based on a legitimate hope that he wouldn’t later become a liability.
The whole controversy has left conservatives crying “cancel culture” and liberals bashing Gillis for his comments. He’s not some terrible person who deserves to be shamed. He certainly should not be barred from comedy clubs, which a couple of them have reportedly done.
But considering how badly he handled the controversy, Gillis may just not be the type of cast member SNL wants or needs. It’s hardly censorious for a private company or television show to recognize that about a potential employee, even in the business of comedy.
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang probably got it right. “I took the time to watch and listen to Shane’s work,” he tweeted on Sunday after reports surfaced that Gillis referred to Yang as a “Jew chink.” “He does not strike me as malignant or evil,” Yang said. “He strikes me as a still-forming comedian from central Pennsylvania who made some terrible and insensitive jokes and comments … For the record, I do not think he should lose his job,” Yang wrote. “We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive. We are all human.”
We could all benefit from being “forgiving rather than punitive” — because we’d run out of figures in every profession if we weren’t. But whether or not you think SNL should’ve fired Gillis, our aversion to “cancel culture” should not entitle him to a free pass.
