The well-known TELEVISION variety show "Saturday Night Live" in the United States often laughs at spoof politicians and events, but recently the program group itself has also been embroiled in a controversy over "political correctness".
The 44-year-old Saturday Night Live has always been a bloodmaking factory in the American film and television industry, including Bill Murray, Will Farrell, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Tina Fei, Amy Poller, Andy Samberg, Kristen Wegger, etc. all came out of the show. For newcomers who want to get ahead in the field of comedy, it is natural to be able to get the favor of the program group. However, shane Gillis, the show's newly promoted stand-up comedian, experienced an empty joy. He was soon exposed to having made many inappropriate remarks suspected of racial discrimination and homosexual discrimination. Under pressure, Saturday Night Live immediately announced that it would immediately stop cooperating with it and apologized to the public for the ineffective background checks of the program team. However, the rhetoric of lamenting the political correctness of "Saturday Night Live" for its grievances soon surfaced. Whether it is right or wrong has also led to a tit-for-tat confrontation between the two views in the American television entertainment industry.
Shane Gillis
Born in Pennsylvania in 1987, Shane Gillis began performing full-time on stand-up comedy at the age of 25 and slowly broke through the Philadelphia entertainment industry. In recent years, he has become a newcomer to comedy central and has become increasingly well-known. Gillis usually likes to tell some self-deprecating meat paragraphs, and his attention to social events is also quite high, which is the kind of "language is not surprising and endless" lord that American talk shows love.
This time, he finally ushered in the peak of his life. On September 12, Saturday Night Live announced that Shane Gillis had officially joined the show crew as a regular member of NBC's veteran variety comedy for the next season. But that night, a melon-eating crowd rummaged through some of his past performances on the video site YouTube, including discriminatory remarks against Chinese, Jews, women and gays. Under pressure, Gillis publicly apologized on social media, but he insisted that he was a "comedian who has always broken down various boundaries", and now these discriminatory remarks are just some of the "bad unsuccessful paragraphs in his comedy career in the past decade, I never want to hurt others, I just want to do my best to say good paragraphs, but this matter, sometimes also take risks.". Four days later, Shane Gillis fell to the bottom from the clouds of his life and career: Saturday Night Live announced that he had terminated his contract and would no longer be hired.
In the week or two since, many of Gillis's peers have supported him, arguing that this politically correct approach to turning over old accounts has become a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all stand-up comedians, which makes people shudder. On the Comedy Central television talk show hosted by well-known comedian David Spade, actors Bill Burr ("Breaking Bad") and Jim Jefferies both lashed out at The Saturday Night Live's expulsion of Shane Gillis. "It's all about canceling culture." Jeffreys said, "They really shouldn't have been fired, it's just something he's done in the past." Is it that everyone's history will have to be re-turned in the future? ”
What he calls "canceling culture" is exactly a kind of boycott and boycott practice that has been very popular in Social Media and even social life in Europe and the United States in recent years. From Harvey Weinstein to Woody Allen, from Michael Jackson to Kevin Spacey, as long as they are involved in scandals, they must not only boycott this person and his future works, including his past works, but also go to the cold palace and "cancel" them completely, as if they did not exist.
In this regard, Bill Bull said indignantly: "Those people are simply deliberately looking for fault, and this time, everyone is really in danger." Please, we're just comedians, and we're not going into politics. Is this kind of thing still over? You post-zeros are a bunch of despicable villains, you don't care about anything, you only want to report others, see people unlucky. ”
In addition, rob schneider, a comedian who has performed in the "Saturday Night Live" program group for many years, also tweeted on his social media account: "This is really a culturally unforgiving era, and the unsuccessful comedians are interrogated by you guys who don't have to watch people and have a hard time." In my opinion, Shane Gillis sincerely apologized, and it was okay, and "Saturday Night Live" could give him a temporary suspension, but it shouldn't be fired all at once. ”
However, shane Gillis's rapid hype is really politically correct, is it really the past when young and ignorant? Others, obviously, don't see it that way. Among them, the view of kareem abdul-jabbar, a former NBA superstar who has now successfully transformed into a professional film critic, is the most valid. The September 25 issue of Hollywood Reporter magazine ran his op-ed, which struck Shane Gillis and his supporters in the first place.
In Jabbar's view, since Gillis argues that his discriminatory remarks are actually saying paragraphs, they are not made up and have failed. Then we should analyze whether these are really unsuccessful passages, whether they are deliberately trying to break the boundaries of culture and use jokes to express true insights, or low-level jokes just for the sake of making people a good one. And the best way to make this distinction is to ask yourself a few questions: First, what era did those hurtful words say? Because we must admit that the times are developing, and some words that used to be indifferent to everyone are now aware of their mistakes because of the progress of civilization. Second, has the man's attitude changed now, and is he aware of the mistakes of the past? Apologize sincerely?
In response to these three questions, Abdul-Jabbar let us look at Gillis's remarks again. First, the performance clips where he was re-translated, performed in 2018. In the past 9012, this person was still using insulting words like "chink" to refer to the Chinese, and "flat-breasted stinky bitch" to describe female soldiers in the Civil War, which could not be excused. Second, people say that mistakes can be corrected and good, but Gillis's apology is completely insincere, and those racist remarks are not a risk to be taken in artistic creation, it is simply an ignorant and opportunistic approach. His passages are not at all "breaking the boundaries of culture", but rather regressing the boundaries of culture back to the 1950s. Therefore, this big ups and downs in his life is completely self-inflicted, and there is nothing to sympathize with.