Shane Gillis is an Americanstand-up comedian, radio personality, and podcaster. Gillis is known for his frequent appearances on the Comedy Central Radio show The Bonfire with Big Jay Oakerson and Dan Soder on Sirius XM, as a regular on The Doug Stanhope Podcast and on the GaS Digital Network comedy podcasts Legion of Skanks and The Real Ass Podcast, as well as co-host of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast with fellow stand-up comedian Matt McCusker. In 2019, Gillis was named one of Just for Laughs "New Faces" at their yearly comedy festival in Montreal. Gillis made national headlines in 2019, when he was announced as a new cast member on the sketch comedy showSaturday Night Live, only to be fired from the show four days later, due to backlash from resurfaced clips from his podcast featuring jokes that were racially insensitive.
Gillis began performing comedy in 2012. He regularly performed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. To further his career, he relocated to Philadelphia. In 2015, he placed third at Helium Comedy Club's annual "Philly's Phunniest" tournament, and he won the tournament the next year. Shane has named among his biggest stand-up influences as Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Norm Macdonald, Patrice O'Neal, and Bill Burr. In 2016, Gillis began Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast with Matt McCusker. In 2017, Gillis became a frequent guest on The Bonfire with Big Jay Oakerson and Dan Soder, increasing his popularity. He also began a weekly show on Compound Media called A Fair One with Tommy Pope. In 2019, Comedy Central named Gillis an "Up Next" comedian as he performed at Comedy Central's Clusterfest. That same year, Gillis was recognized as a "New Face" at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. During an interview for All Things Considered at that festival, Gillis was interrupted by stand-up comedian Robert Kelly, who said, "You're very funny, dude... I mean, I wanted to hate it." The interviewer, Andrew Limbong, described Gillis' set at the festival, writing: "Shane Gillis gives off post-jock energy—like someone who used to play a sport in school, then had the self-awareness to realize he wasn't cut out for it and stopped—but he isn't bitter about it at all. His friendly demeanor distracts you, while he sneaks in just a whiff of social insight within a barrage of self-deprecating sex jokes." Gillis's addition to the cast of Saturday Night Live, a long-running NBC sketch-comedy show, as a featured cast member was announced on September 12, 2019, along with Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman. Later that day, freelance journalist Seth Simons posted clips, since removed from YouTube, of an episode of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast from 2018 in which Gillis makes a joke that included racist remarks about Chinese people in which he used the epithet "chink". In other clips, podcast hosts McCusker and Gillis rank comedians by race, gender, and sexual orientation and use homophobic slurs. That night, Gillis posted a tweet saying that he was a "comedian who pushes boundaries" and that "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." On September 16, 2019, a spokesperson for Lorne Michaels announced that Gillis would not join the show in light of the controversy. Gillis has since appeared on SiriusXM's "Bennington" and “Jim Norton and Sam Roberts”, as well as the podcasts "The Tim Dillon Show", "History Hyenas", "Artie Lange's Halfway House", and "Flagrant 2" to tell his side of the story. Gillis maintains that while the clips look bad, they were taken out of context and he was misquoted in the majority of articles reporting the story. He also says that he immediately regretted using the "I'm a comedian who pushes boundaries" statement, blaming it on having "literally 5 minutes of being pressured to write anything", regretfully adding the statement was "corny" and that he officially retracts the statement. In January 2020, Gillis was named "2019's Stand-Up Comedian of the Year" in Theinterrobang's Sixth Annual Comedy Awards.
