Bowen Yang is setting the record straight.
The Saturday Night Live castmember clapped back at comedian Michelle Best, who seemingly worked as a background actor at SNL, for accusing him of getting Shane Gillis fired in 2019. The stand-up comedian was quickly dropped from the NBC sketch comedy show after being hired for using racial and homophobic slurs on a podcast.
“Can we acknowledge that Bowen Yang bitched him off the show- and he’s the bigger man to come host after being unfairly ditched bc of a whiny queen,” Best commented on a video posted on SNL‘s official Instagram account on Wednesday. “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 responded to Best, writing, “Didn’t do any of this but I wrote the sketch you were a background actor in,” adding a smiley face emoji.
The Wicked actor has been with SNL since 2018, initially joining the writing staff before being promoted the following year to the on-air cast. As for Gillis, he returned to the NBC show last year as host, and he’s set to host Saturday night’s upcoming episode, with musical guest Tate McRae.
In October last year, Lorne Michaels told The Wall Street Journal that he “was angry” over Gillis’ firing. “He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” the SNL boss said at the time. “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.’”
Michaels added that it was NBC’s decision to fire the comedian. “That was very strong from the people in charge,” he said. “And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”
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