Bowen yang snl4/1/2023 “I kind of imprinted onto Michelle this diva worship that I didn’t recognize,” he says. Most recently, he remembered how Michelle Branch’s album “The Spirit Room” inspired daydreaming fantasies he misunderstood. Like many queer people, he’s still discovering pivotal influences with a jolt of, “Oh, that’s what that was” self-awareness. Finding culture that spoke to him, a gay Chinese-American boy growing up in Colorado, meant excavating his own confusing wants and needs. (Look up his lip sync performances of famous monologues - from Sandra Oh pleading on “Grey’s Anatomy” to Meryl Streep drawling disdain in “The Devil Wears Prada” - and thank us later.) It even forms the backbone of “Las Culturistas,” in which he and Rogers trade thoughts on their current obsessions and ask their guest a deceptively simple question: “What was the first piece of culture that made you say culture was for you?”įor Yang, it’s a tricky one. Yang’s acidic, pithy takes on pop culture and celebrity are now his bread and butter. While Yang originally went to NYU for its med school, improv and pop culture quickly became cornerstones of his life before taking it over completely. “That’s when I got a sense of what American humor was.” He remembers sitting down in 2000 to watch his first episode, which was hosted by Charlize Theron, and thinking that she must be important if she got to host “SNL.” At that point, he says, the show “opened all these doors in the scope of my pop culture knowledge.” “I was 8, and I was probably too young for it, but that’s when I started to watch ‘SNL,’” Yang says. No matter the role, Yang’s delivery - somehow bone dry and histrionic all at once - makes him stand out on a legendary show that once taught him the basics of American pop culture when he and his family first moved from Canada to the United States. Characters from his initial auditions - including a manic SoulCycle instructor and the man from the ubiquitous “choking poster” who bears more than a passing resemblance to Yang - made it onto the show, a fact that still blows his mind. He’s slapped RuPaul across the face in a “Dynasty” parody set in a coal mine and lectured Harry Styles about using a corporate Instagram to promote his sad thirst traps. He’s tackled breakout impressions of presidential hopeful Andrew Yang and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, as no one else could. Since then, Yang’s had more surreal moments on “SNL” than he can count. “I could just have fun with it, put on a wig and pretend to be Michiko Kakutani. “I really enjoyed the challenge of working around what might have been perceived as this ‘handicap,’” he says. After auditioning for “SNL” a few times, he says he actually felt freer to do his own thing after he ran out of famous Asian figures to impersonate. Neither fact escapes Yang, but he approaches his place in comedy with enthusiastic opportunism. “It gave me the perspective I could not confer upon myself for the 12 months leading up to that point.”Īdding to the pressure were the unavoidable facts that Yang is one of the cast’s first openly gay men to star on the show, and its first Chinese-American star, period. “I just decompressed and let it all hit me,” he says, with the careful consideration of someone who knows when he needs to thread a verbal needle. “I was fully burnt out - and in some ways I think that was good,” he says, “because I was just fully numb.” He then booked himself a solo vacation that let him take a beat and absorb it all, for better and for worse. By the time his promotion to cast member was announced in fall 2019, Yang was almost too exhausted to absorb it.
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