Bowen Yang Speaks on Criticism Over Leaving ‘SNL’

Bowen Yang is opening up about the criticism he received both during and after his time on Saturday Night Live.

Yang shocked SNL audiences when he departed the series at the end of last December, with his final appearance being on the episode hosted by his Wicked: For Good co-star Ariana Grande.

On his podcast Las Culturistas, which he hosts with Matt Rogers, he discussed his decision to leave the show that made him a household name.

“The current entertainment ecosystem is so turbulent that people have completely valid reasons for staying longer, or in a lot of cases, don’t have the privilege of staying on as long as they would like to,” he said. “I have this very beautiful thing where I get to say that I stayed on exactly as long as I wanted to.”

He said he was even “unsure” about returning to SNL this past summer, but is “so glad I did.”

During his time on the series, critics frequently said Yang had “no range” as a comedian, which had him feeling like he “was really bogged down the entire time I was there about the idea that there was no range in anything I did.”

“I knew I was never gonna play the dad. I was never gonna play the generic thing in sketches,” he said. “It’s a sketch show. Each thing is like four minutes long. It is short and collapsed by necessity, so therefore it plays on archetypes.”

He then explained that those archetypes can be stereotypical, which led viewers to believe he was doing the same thing over and over again even when he was trying something new.

“These archetypes are also in a relationship with generic things, and there is a genericism in whiteness and in being a canvas to build upon,” he said. “I came in pre-stretched, pre-dyed. People had their over-determinations on what I was, which was: ‘Oh, that’s just the gay Asian guy on SNL.‘ So anytime I would try to work outside of that, it got completely ignored or it still got collapsed to, ‘Oh, he’s being gay and Asian as always.’”