Comedian Shane Gillis let the f-word slip out in the middle of an early sketch on Saturday Night Live last night. The accident amused some viewers and angered others, not because of the word itself but because of what happened to previous SNL performers who made the same mistake.
Fans have brought up the tale of Jenny Slate, a cast member who blurted out the F-word in her first-ever episode and was fired by the end of her first season. Fans often conflate the two events, using it as an example of how seriously the slip-up is treated by NBC.
Slate, however, has been clear that the two events were not correlated.
“That’s not why I got fired. I just didn’t belong there,” Slate told InStyle in 2019. “I didn’t do a good job, I didn’t click. I have no idea how [‘SNL’ creator] Lorne [Michaels] felt about me. All I know is, it didn’t work for me, and I got fired.”
Related: Shane Gillis Drops F-Bomb on ‘Saturday Night Live’ During ‘Cat in the Hat’ Skit, Shocking Audience & Viewers
Slate was just one of a long line of successful actors — from Anthony Michael Hall to Joan Cusack — who were talented but not a strong fit for the show. Slate has even expressed some resentment for the continued misunderstanding:
“I’m a New York Times best-selling children’s author, all of this stuff that is so intentional and worthy, but people often want to frame my success as an ascent from one failure that was the decision of some man who didn’t understand me 10 years ago,” she said. “I just wonder, if I were a man, would people be so obsessed with the fact that I said a swear?”
Has Anybody Actually Been Fired For Saying the F-Word on ‘SNL’?
After over 50 years of the show, there has not been a single case of a cast member being explicitly fired as a result of profanity. The closest thing to a confirmed case is with cast member Charles Rocket in 1981.
During the goodnights of a February episode, Rocket continued a running gag throughout the episode riffing off the famous “Who Shot J.R. Ewing?” installment of soap opera Dallas. Rocket said, “I’d like to know who f—ing did it.”
The line drew shocked laughter on stage from his fellow castmates, but they weren’t laughing the next morning as the show had to deal with outraged viewers.
“We deeply regret this incident and are taking appropriate action to preclude its recurrence,” an NBC spokesman said about the incident.
Much like with Slate 28 years later, Rocket was never a popular cast member as far as the fans and critics were concerned. Rocket was fired a month later; it wasn’t explicitly because of the F-bomb, but it certainly couldn’t have helped.