C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019
BY ELAHE IZADI
AND BETHONIE BUTLER
“Saturday Night Live” has part-
ed ways with Shane Gillis, the just-
hired stand-up comic whose past
use of racist, homophobic and sex-
ist language led to a firestorm last
week.
The comedian, who was an-
nounced Thursday as a featured
player for Season 45, was criticized
for using slurs against Asians and
the LGBT community in recent
podcast episodes.
SNL producer Lorne Michaels
confirmed the development in a
statement sent through a spokes-
person on Monday: “A fter speaking
with Shane Gillis, we have decided
he will not be joining S NL.”
“We were not aware of his prior
remarks that have surfaced over
the past few days,” the statement
read. “The language he used is of-
fensive, hurtful and unacceptable.
We are sorry that we did not see
these clips earlier, and that our
vetting process was not up to our
standard.”
Gillis responded on Twitter. “Of
course I wanted an opportunity to
prove myself at SNL, but I under-
stand it would be too much of a
distraction,” he wrote. “I respect
the decision they made. I’m honest-
ly grateful for the opportunity.”
The statement from the spokes-
person said that Gillis was hired
“on the strength of his talent as a
comedian” and his audition. “We
want SNL to have a variety o f voices
and points of view within the
show.”
SNL also added two other fea-
tured performers last week: Bowen
Yang, who was widely celebrated as
the show’s f irst cast member of East
Asian descent, and Chloe Fineman.
But hours after the casting an-
nouncement, freelance comedy
journalist Seth Simons called at-
tention to a 2018 episode of “Matt
and Shane’s Secret Podcast” in
which Gillis and co-host Matt Mc-
Cusker used slurs against Chinese
people, mocking their accents and
making racist references to China-
town. (All past episodes have been
scrubbed from the podcast’s You-
Tube channel.)
Gillis initially addressed the
mounting backlash by tweeting
th at he is a “comedian who pushesboundaries. Sometimes I miss.” He
added he was “happy to apologize
to anyone who’s actually been of-
fended by anything I’ve said.”
Gillis, who is from Mechanics-
burg, Pa., was unknown to a broad
national audience b efore last week,
but his star was rising: Over the
summer, he performed in showcas-
es for Comedy Central’s “Up Next”
and the Just for Laughs comedy
festival.
This isn’t the first time an SNL
hire has caused controversy. Melis-
sa Villaseñor, who will begin her
third season when the show re-
turns Sept. 28, was criticized in
2016 after social media users un-
covered years-old tweets with
questionable humor about race.The show never publicly addressed
it.
In this case, the offending lan-
guage was recent, and it came not
in a tweet or a stand-up set but on a
podcast, where the line between
joke material and casual conversa-
tion can seem blurrier to the public.
The debate over SNL’s hiring
choice raised questions about the
show’s v etting process. It a lso came
amid a broader conversation about
“cancel culture” and what ways co-
medians should be held account-
able for offensive m aterial.
Vice reported Friday that Gillis
had used an anti-Semitic and racist
slur to describe Democratic presi-
dential candidate Andrew Yang in
May while appearing as a guest onanother podcast. “I prefer comedy
that makes people think and
doesn’t take cheap shots,” the en-
trepreneur responded on Twitter,
but he said he didn’t think Gillis
should lose his newly announced
SNL job over the remark. (Yang
tweeted Monday that Gillis had
reached out to him and that the two
would meet soon.)
Some of Gillis’s most vocal critics
included fellow comics. “A s a co-
median I usually side with the co-
medians on sensitive subjects. But
this is just plain racist,” comedian
Jimmy O. Yang tweeted amid the
initial outcry. “Standing up against
this is just as important as support-
ing our Asian brothers and sisters.
This man has to go.”
But Gillis also received support
from several industry veterans, in-
cluding Norm Macdonald and Rob
Schneider, who both worked on the
long-running sketch series.
“A s a former SNL cast member I
am sorry that you had the misfor-
tune of being a cast member during
this era of cultural unforgiveness
where comedic m isfires are subject
to the intolerable inquisition of
those who never risked bombing
onstage themselves,” Schneider
tweeted.
Schneider — w ho in recent years
has been critical of the show that
made him famous and has long
been criticized f or employing racial
stereotypes in his own comedy —
suggested a suspension might have
been more appropriate.
MacDonald, who spent five sea-
sons on SNL in the ’90s, made it
clear he was unhappy with the deci-sion. “Of course you know, this
means WAR,” the former “Week-
end Update” a nchor wrote.
On his Comedy Central talk
show Monday, fellow SNL alum
David Spade said he preferred “to
stay out of the fray,” deferring to
two of his “Lights Out With David
Spade” guests: comedians Jim Jef-
feries and Bill Burr.
“The guy shouldn’t have been
fired,” Jefferies said. “It’s just a cou-
ple things back in his history — are
we going to go back through every-
one’s h istory?”
Burr agreed: “If you say some-
thing like that you can’t work in a
sketch show, but, like, it’s okay for
what, he can work at a lumber-
yard?”
Sasheer Zamata, who quietly left
SNL in 2017 a fter four seasons, told
Buzzfeed’s AM2DM that comedi-
ans should be able to say what they
want — w ith a caveat: “Say whatev-
er you want, but you also have to
know that the audience is going to
feel how they feel, and they also
have a right to say what they want
to say.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Shane Gillis no longer joining SNL after outcry over slurs
LEFT: PHIL PROVENCIO/NBC/ASSOCIATED PRESS; RIGHT: EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The “Saturday Night Live” cast will not include Shane Gillis, left, after reports of his past use of racist
language. A statement from producer Lorne Michaels, right, said the remarks were “unacceptable.”The
Reliable
Source
Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil
have moved on to new assignments at
The Post. A search is underway for a
new Reliable Source columnist. The
column will return.BY TRAVIS DESHONG
When you watch Morgan Spur-
lock tell people he wants to open
a fast-food joint, you see skeptical
looks and stunned laughs in re-
sponse. But his half-smiling pok-
er face is ironclad. He’s serious
but still winking at you.
His farm-to-table restaurant,
Holy Chicken, is also the name-
sake of his latest film, “Super Size
Me 2: Holy Chicken.” It’s a sequel
to the Oscar-nominated stunt
documentary that made him fa-
mous 15 years ago as the jocular
redhead who ate McDonald’s
food exclusively for a month. This
time, his new gimmick flips the
script: Instead of consuming fast
food, Spurlock starts selling it.
“If I’ve learned anything out of
making a career out of question-
able life choices,” S purlock says at
the start of the film, “it’s that
sometimes the only way to find
the truth and solve the problem is
to become a part of that problem.”
Questionable life choices.
Spurlock might be referring to his
McDonald’s bender, or any of the
other stunts he’s pulled on televi-
sion, ostensibly for the edifica-
tion of his viewers — living on
minimum wage for a month,
spending several weeks in prison,
briefly working in a coal mine.
But it’s been his off-screen life
choices that recently left his ca-
reer (and “Super Size Me 2,” for a
time) in limbo.
In 2017, amid a wave of Me Too
revelations elsewhere in the en-
tertainment industry, Spurlock
proactively admitted to bad be-
havior in his past, including a
sexual harassment case that he
had settled eight years earlier
with a former assistant. Bettering
himself and making amends
doesn’t have to happen in the
public eye, he says, so he resigned
from his production company
and stepped out of the spotlight.
“I am part of the problem,” he
wrote then. “We all are. But I am
also part of the solution.”
So, back on the big screen,
what is Morgan Spurlock part of
now — the problem, or the solu-
tion?
In “ Super Size Me 2 ,” w hich was
yanked from the 2018 Sundance
slate after Spurlock stepped away
and now marks his comeback a
year later, he is both. Spurlock is
once again up to his muckraking
high jinks, delivering the scoop
from within the very structures of
American fast-food mongering
and corporate agribusiness that
he seeks to critique.
The scoop: The companies that
sell us fast food have been sneaki-
ly presenting themselves to cus-
tomers as healthier and more
socially responsible — deploying
such feel-good terms as “artisan-
al” and “handcrafted” that
amount to little more than empty,
market-tested signaling. Those
labels slapped onto Perdue or
Ty son chicken in the frozen aisle,
Spurlock observes, don’t actually
tell you much about what hap-
pens behind the scenes. “Free-
range,” for example, just means
that chickens are presented the
option of going outdoors for
“some” part of the day.
Spurlock teams up with an
Alabama poultry farmer named
Jonathan Buttram and his family
to raise his own chickens after
getting stonewalled by larger pro-
ducers, and he has fun playing by
the industry’s standards. “You’re
living the chicken dream!” Spur-
lock says to one of his young,
“free-range” b irds, grinning wryly
as the chick waddles in a fenced
space extending only a few feet
from the door.
The documentary’s main tar-
get is the multibillion-dollar
chicken industry’s big five mega-
companies — the “Chicken Ma-
fia,” as Buttram calls them. They
pay their farmers through a
“tournament system,” pitting
grower against grower, where
griping about unfair conditions
often leads to a flock of smaller,
even sicker birds the next month,
triggering a cycle of lower output
and lower compensation.
“Farmers and chickens are be-
ing mistreated,” B uttram told The
Washington Post. “Since this
movie was made three years ago,
it’s g otten a lot worse.” ( In t he film
Buttram and his family, who say
they have been victims of corpo-
rate retaliation for cooperating
with Spurlock, serve as the main
avatars of the family farms thatthey say suffer under this regime.)
“There’s not a company out
there that tells you the truth
about their food, where it comes
from, what it means to the envi-
ronment we live in,” S purlock told
The Post. “A nd we live in a time
now when people crave that level
of honesty and information.”
And so, he offers moviegoers
and potential customers the hon-
esty he believes they crave —alongside the fried chicken they
definitely do crave — not by
sneaking cameras into the Chick-
en Mafia’s inner sanctum, but by
laying bare his own restaurant’s
operations.
Spurlock ventures into a lab
with food scientists and chefs to
concoct the highlight of his
menu: a Grilled Crispy Chicken
sandwich. It’s “crispy” because
the word “fried” is marketingtaboo. It’s not really “grilled”
since grilling fried chicken would
overcook it. Instead, “grill marks”
are painted on with dark food
coloring.
By the film’s end, Spurlock has
an operational Holy Chicken pop-
up in Ohio. It’s an in-your-face,
postmodern fantasia of reds,
greens and boldface messaging.
It’s also an exercise in radical
transparency in the fast-food in-dustry. A wall displays such
phrases as “all natural” and “lo-
cal” along with a block of text
beginning with, “Not sure what
all these words actually mean?
Great! Because, legally speaking,
they don’t mean much.”
The Ohio pop-up is just the
start of what Spurlock envisions
as a minor revolution beyond the
film. How large that movement
gets will depend on how large the
market is for fast-food restau-
rants functioning as gallery-
styled exhibitions of these restau-
rants’ various deceptions. Suc-
cess can mean proving that you
can run a chicken place that has a
healthier relationship with its
suppliers and customers than the
industry currently extends, even
if it still serves fried chicken with
grill marks painted on it. It’s n ot a
solution to the problem, but it
could be part of one.
“We’ve already identified
chicken growers that we’re going
to be working with,” Spurlock
told The Post. “Once we open up
two, three locations, the goal is to
have our own farms, our own
integrated system where we can
pay these people more money
and they can benefit from profit
participation.”
It would seem Spurlock stands
to benefit, too. His dual role as
filmmaker and restaurateur
means that “Super Size Me 2 ”
does not just do the documentari-
an’s w ork of nudging audiences to
eat their vegetables. It can also
work as a feature-length adver-
tisement for his franchisable
business, nudging audiences to
eat his chicken.
Spurlock’s return to the screen
may leave an odd taste in people’s
mouths regardless of how they
feel about the film. The culture is
still grappling with how and
when men who have admitted or
been accused of sexual wrongdo-
ing should emerge from exile. In a
phone interview, Spurlock said
he wanted people to focus not on
him and his transgressions but on
the farmers who are being
squeezed by major chicken pro-
cessors.
“I’m hopeful that people don’t
try and penalize [the farmers]
and the message we’re trying to
put out based on some things that
I said a few years ago,” Spurlock
told The Post. “A ll I can do is have
faith that every day I can contin-
ue to be the best person I can and
translate that to the work I be-
lieve in, which is telling stories
that make a difference.”
If he and Holy Chicken can
liberate even a small portion of
poultry farmers from the Chicken
Mafia’s grip, Spurlock says, that
will disrupt the status quo. “One
percent to 2 percent, 2 percent to
3 percent — just that small move-
ment is a huge movement,” he
told The Post.
What if Holy Chicken doesn’t
turn out scores of food activists,
just hungry people on their lunch
break? Spurlock is optimistic. He
believes people like fried chicken
and want to be in on the joke.
“I think the best part,” he said,
“is that people can have their
chicken and eat it, too.” You could
picture him winking as he said it.
[email protected]In ‘Super Size Me 2,’ Spurlock dishes the honesty he believes customers crave
PHOTOS BY SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMS
Morgan Spurlock at his Holy Chicken restaurant in “Super Size Me 2.” “If I’ve learned anything out of making a career out of questionable
life choices,” Spurlock says, “it’s that sometimes the only way to find the truth and solve the problem is to become part of that problem.”In the documentary, Spurlock teams up with an Alabama poultry farmer to raise his own chickens —
and has fun playing by the multibillion-dollar chicken industry’s standards.Film gets the scoop on
chicken industry — and
advertises his restaurant