Bud Light partners with comedian who lost ‘SNL’ gig for using racial and anti-gay slurs

Following a year marked by an anti-LGBTQ+ boycott, Bud Light has partnered with comedian Shane Gillis, who is perhaps most widely known for losing a job at Saturday Night Live over his use of racial and anti-gay slurs.

Gillis announced the partnership via Instagram on Tuesday.

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The deal seems to indicate Bud Light’s priorities and marketing strategy in the wake of its partnership last spring with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which led to widespread calls for a boycott of the beer brand from anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives.

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Back in September 2019, the long-running NBC sketch comedy series announced that Gillis, along with Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman, had been hired as featured cast members. The same day, videos from a podcast he co-hosted, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, surfaced online, featuring Gillis using racist and homophobic slurs. Soon after, Vice uncovered additional audio of Gillis describing then-Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang as a “Jew ch**k.”

The comedian released a standard non-apology, describing himself as “a comedian who pushes boundaries” and adding that he would be “happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.” Gillis later retracted the statement, saying that he regretted that it sounded “pretentious.”

Within days, an SNL spokesperson announced that Gillis would not be joining the show’s cast after all.

Gillis has resisted turning himself into a martyr to “cancel culture” as anti-trans comedians like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais have done. In a 2022 New Yorker profile, he suggested that he’s uncomfortable with fans who are attracted to his work primarily due to his use of slurs. Far-right outlet The Daily Caller described him as “conservative-friendly” rather than conservative in its coverage of the Bud Light partnership this week.

Still, Gillis has gained a substantial following among white, right-leaning men since the SNL dust-up. He even scored a Netflix stand-up special, released in September.

“Right-wing media adores him,” New York Times critic-at-large Jason Zinoman wrote last year in an essay that positioned Gillis’s comedy as appealing to a MAGA audience while affectionately mocking them.

Regardless of Gillis’s own politics, the Bud Light partnership appears to be yet another example of the brand’s desperation to win back its conservative critics. Parent company Anheuser-Busch has been widely criticized for its response to the anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, which included a statement from CEO Brendan Whitworth essentially apologizing for the partnership with Mulvaney.