To read about the rest of the Culture Shifters, including TV writer Cord Jefferson and activist Mariah Moore, return to the full list here.
In 2014, when Kim Jong-un was absent from public life and rumored to be gravely ill, Bobby Moynihan portrayed the North Korean Supreme Leader in a âSaturday Night Liveâ cold open. The impression was typical Moynihan: loud, excitable, a bit slapstick. He jumped around the stage and whipped himself into a frenzy.
Five years later, Bowen Yang played Kim during his on-camera âSNLâ debut. Yangâs approach was wildly different. Instead of treating Kim like a noisy bloviator, Yang made him petty. He scowled, rolled his eyes and came across as a bitchy gossip.
Itâs no discredit to Moynihanâs talents to say that Yangâs sketch is the one that stuck. Positioning a dictator as screamy and narcissistic is a no-brainer; finding irony in his personality is transgressive.
Yang had already spent several months writing for the show, but it was his premiere as a performer that showcased his ability to reinterpret old concepts with fresh irreverence. His funniest recurring character is fictional Chinese bureaucrat Chen Biao, a gleeful braggart who calls himself a âcrisis queenâ and once transformed Megan Thee Stallion lyrics into a Communist manifesto. When parodying Elton John, politician Andrew Yang and former writer Fran Leibowitz, Yangâs mannerisms morph into well-calibrated caricatures, accentuating the uncanny (and sometimes obnoxious) intimacy derived from specific celebritiesâ personas.
Part of Yangâs singularity stems from the fact that he is the showâs first Chinese American cast member (and only the fourth cast member of Asian descent in its 46-season history). Thatâs one of several traits that makes the 30-year-old different from most âSNLâ veterans. Heâs also gay, extremely online and possesses a testy absurdism common among millennial humorists.
Yangâs popular podcast âLas Culturistas,â for example, ends with a segment titled âI Donât Think So Honey,â in which he and co-host Matt Rogers adopt 60 seconds of faux outrage about prosaic topics like plant care, toenail odor, 5G technology and Meryl Streepâs movie taste. In an increasingly ridiculous capitalistic world in which survival depends on building a âpersonal brand,â performative indignation has found a comic groove â and Yangâs version of it is wittier than anyone elseâs, as evident in his recent viral turn as the aggrieved âIceberg That Sunk the Titanic.â
ââLas Culturistasâ sort of gave me space to extemporaneously talk and try out different points of view and aspects of my personality and literally just try out takes,â Yang said during a recent Zoom conversation. âWith âI Donât Think So Honey,â itâs just us being like, âLet me try to fake a strong negative opinion about, you know, trucker hats or whatever.ââ
The podcast had a modest start in 2016. Not long after Yang joined âSNL,â he and Rogers signed a contract for the megaconglomerate iHeartMedia to bankroll the series, putting them in the same ballpark as Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes and Questlove. It currently averages half a million downloads per month, according to an iHeartMedia representative.
When Yang was still starting out, he and his friends would hear the same label: âtoo niche.â Theyâd go to auditions or pitch meetings and come away with what could easily sound like a code for âtoo queerâ or âtoo youngâ or âtoo nonwhite.â But with Yangâs rise, the cheeky, rapid-fire, exceedingly pop-culture-literate intuition of comics in their 20s and early 30s can no longer be seen as an outlier. It is the moment and, perhaps, the future. âLas Culturistasâ alone has spawned a handful of copycats, with Rogers and Yang leading a changing comic tide the way that Mike Nichols and Elaine May did in the early 1960s.
Still, Yang doesnât quite agree that âSNLâ is suddenly so much queerer than it used to be. Sure, his most memorable sketch to date (co-written with the great Julio Torres) stars Harry Styles as a gay Sara Lee social media manager caught posting horny comments (âWreck me daddyâ) on celebritiesâ Instagram photos. (Fun fact: Yang wrote a pandemic-themed Chef Boyardee follow-up for TimothĂ©e Chalamet, but it got cut.) He believes that the internet âsnark galleryâ doesnât give the series enough credit for its long-term progress, pointing to queer alumni like Paula Pell, Chris Kelly, Terry Sweeney, Sam Jay and James Anderson, who wrote for âSNLâ from 2000 to 2020.
âThe thing about âSNLâ is that it is this container for all sorts of different things to coexist,â Yang said. âI donât think thereâs this new phenomenon that there is a queer sensibility in the show all of a sudden. Itâs been at a different volume maybe, and we turned some of those tracks up.â
In general, Yang has opted to distance himself from the Sunday-morning quarterbacking that accompanies âSNL.â Scroll through Twitter after a new episode and youâll see a lot of puffed-up people declaring the showâs irrelevance â despite clearly monitoring its every move. Partly inspired by Jenny Odellâs book âHow to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,â Yang quit the platform (more or less) because he anticipated what it might do to his sense of self.
âIâm not saying that that snark gallery is flawed in the way that it has existed all this time, but itâs not necessarily that useful for me as a performer to mire myself in the snark of it all,â he said. âNot to draw this terrible capitalist simile, but âSNLâ is Amazon and the sketches and the people in them are products, and everyoneâs just leaving reviews â but in the way that Amazon reviews have this tone to them where itâs like, âWell, I hate this thing because it came in the mail broken.â Itâs that same frequency of people being like, âLet me come in hot with my take because theyâre these granular units of things that I can attach my opinion onto because Iâll watch something and consume it within four minutes.ââ
As a stand-up who has performed everywhere from dingy Brooklyn basements to HBOâs â2 Dope Queens,â Yang is used to being evaluated in real time. But where a live audienceâs reaction is fleeting, a tweet or a piece of criticism can last forever. Sometimes the feedback involves his identity, like the time he saw someone say, âBowen only plays Asian people. He canât do anything but play Asians,â which left him thinking, âOK, so youâre saying thereâs a deficiency in being Asian.â Eventually, that discourse colors oneâs self-regard, no matter how famous you are, and so like other âSNLâ stars, Yang had to turn away.
âIt made complete sense to me why people whoâd been at the show for a long time who are still in the cast, like Kenan for example, are just like, âI donât care,ââ Yang said. âIt sounds kind of cruel and maybe a little callous, but itâs the necessary, healthy thing to do.â
Yang does, however, find validation from his peers. (He is closest with Aidy Bryant, Cecily Strong, Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner.) He is encouraged by seeing mainstays from the proverbial New York comedy scene, like his friend Patti Harrrison, achieve their own eminence. And for whatever itâs worth, he has also received affirmation from unlikely sources. Take Andrew Yang, whom he impersonated during the 2020 presidential race. After Dave Chappelleâs post-election show in November, he and Nwodim were doing shots in their dressing rooms when Yang got a phone call saying the other Yang (no relation) was downstairs and wanted to meet him. Heâd been there for the taping. It was a âlovelyâ conversation. They exchanged numbers.
About a month later, while Yang was about to step into the shower in his Clinton Hill apartment, his phone rang. âI heard on the other line, âHi, Bowen! Itâs Andrew Yang!ââ he recalled. âIâm like, âOh my god, how are you?â He was in Georgia at the time helping with the runoffs, and he was telling me, âIâm going to announce my candidacy for mayor.â People had been speculating enough up to that point, so I wasnât surprised. I was just like, âGreat! OK, itâs happening.â I wished him the best of luck, but I was ass-naked when he told me.â
Itâs not uncommon for politicians to commune with the comedians who roast them, especially on âSNL,â where President Gerald Ford once delivered the âlive from New York ...â introduction and Tina Fey landed a seismic career boost after appearing alongside Sarah Palin. But thereâs something about Bowen Yang that makes people want to know him beyond the enchanting spell that fame casts. Because âLas Culturistasâ is so personality-driven, and because it underscores the cultural vocabulary of its time, and because Yang has made such an instantaneous splash on TV, he seems like someone who is crystallizing the next decade of comedy right before our eyes â the familiar and the new rolled into one exciting package.
âI got to ingratiate myself or put myself out there to an audience,â Yang said of his upward momentum. âI feel like with the people who say âI listen to you on âLas Culturistas,ââ Iâm like, âOK, you kind of have a better sense of who I am over someone whoâs like, âI loved you in âNora from Queens.ââ Thereâs not much else to go off of than âThank you for watching.â People who say they listen to âLas Culturistas,â Iâm like, âOK, thank you, what do you think of âBling Empire?âââ