Bowen Yang reveals real reason he shockingly left SNL: ‘I was really bogged down the entire time’

Wicked actor and comedian Bowen Yang has revealed the circumstances that led to his surprise exit from Saturday Night Live (SNL) after seven years.

In December, the comic announced his unconventional decision to exit the iconic, late-night sketch show midway through the 51st season, with his final episode taking place – alongside his friend Ariana Grande and Cher – on 20 December. 

Speaking on his Las Culturistas with his friend and co-host Matt Rogers on Wednesday (7 January), Bowen Yang candidly – and occasionally emotionally – explained what was behind his decision to leave the series.

“This is honestly what’s behind it: it’s time. You would do seven seasons,” he said, referring to previous comedians who have exited the show, “and then Covid and 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.

“I have this very beautiful thing where I get to say that I stayed on exactly as long as I wanted to,” he continued.

Yang explained that he was “unsure” about returning to the show for the 51st season at all, but was “so glad” that he decided to. He waxed lyrical about how “grateful” he is to have had the chance to appear on the show at all – for seven years as a writer and six years as an actor – but suggested that it could be a pressurised working environment.

“Working there is just making peace with the fact that things are completely out of your control, down to audience response to a joke. I think having that and going into it, down to 12:55am, not being sure that sketch was going to go to air, there’s a million reasons it could get cut. Nothing is guaranteed, in a nutshell,” he explained.

Later on in their lengthy chat, the pair reflected on the reality of dealing with online criticism, with Yang confessing that he and his former SNL castmates did look at viewer comments and reviews, saying “it gets to us”.

One critique that Yang struggled most with was that his characters lacked range, despite the fact that he played characters including George Santos, JD Vance, Harry Potter elf Dobby, an iceberg, a straight man and Moo Deng the adorable hippo.

“I feel like I was really bogged down the entire time I was there about the idea that there was no range in anything I did,” Yang explained. 

Rogers jumped in to say that comments about the actors’ range were “lazy”, but Yang shot back, saying that he understood where the viewers were coming from.

“I knew I was never gonna play the dad. I was never gonna play the generic thing in sketches. 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. 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 continued.

“I came in pre-stretched, pre-dyed, whatever. People had their over-determinations on what I was, which was: ‘Oh, that’s just the gay Asian guy on SNL.’ Any time 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.'”

When Yang joined the cast of SNL in 2019, he was the first Chinese-American to do so in the show’s near 50 year history. He also became the first SNL featured player to receive an Emmy Award nomination for the show, and is now the most-nominated Asian male in Emmy Award history.

Rogers went on to argue that while those commentators might not know that they’re being homophobic, they are.

“I think range is a myth and it’s all about palatability, whether you’re getting taxed on it or you are subsidised,” Yang added. 

In December, following news of his exit, Yang said that he learned a lot about himself and others during his time on the infamous comedy show.

“I learned that human error can be nothing but correct. I learned that comedy is mostly logistics and that it will usually fail until it doesn’t, which is the besssst,” he wrote on Instagram.

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