Bowen Yang Made ‘Saturday Night Live’ Work for Him
The final sketch of a Saturday Night Live episode is usually reserved for the show’s weirdest concepts. Known as the “10-to-1” slot, these bits evoke the feeling of a night gone a little too late. Think Steve Martin and Bill Murray repeatedly wondering “what the hell is that?” at something off-screen, or a group of profane sloths reciting ridiculous “facts” about themselves in a digital short. These setups are bizarre, provocative, and often hit-or-miss.
But this weekend’s concluding sketch was more sentimental than absurd. In “Delta Lounge,” the cast member Bowen Yang played Ed, an old-school eggnog peddler completing his last shift before the holidays and receiving a call from his partner, Ronda (the night’s host, Ariana Grande). The two launched into a duet of “Please Come Home for Christmas,” before Ronda arrived at the airport just in time to help Ed bid goodbye.
The sketch doubled as a send-off for Yang, who’d announced earlier yesterday that he would be departing the show after that night’s episode. He was overcome with emotion as his character began talking about the job he was leaving behind. “I just feel so lucky that I ever got to work here, and I just wanted to enjoy it for a little bit longer, especially the people,” Ed said, holding back sobs. “I’ve loved every single person who works here, because they’ve done so much for me, especially my boss.” Cher, the night’s musical guest, then appeared as his manager—a larger-than-life cameo befitting Yang, a comedian who’d begun his tenure facing what seemed like outsized expectations.
In 2019, Yang became only the third cast member in Saturday Night Live history to be openly gay, and the first Chinese American performer in the program’s lineup. Yang has said he’s found these facts limiting: “There’s an idea that all of what I do is queer and Asian, which I don’t think is true,” he told Esquire earlier this month. “I get sick of people reducing the work I do on the show to those identifiers.” He covered a wide spectrum of roles: He could play a pygmy hippo gone viral, or J. D. Vance, or the mythical “evertree” that also worked as a lawyer. He could offer ridiculous takes on inanimate objects, such as a drone hovering mysteriously over New Jersey, or deepen a seemingly thin premise, as he did in a sketch about the couple featured in the choking hazard poster, begrudgingly meeting their fans.
Yet his biggest contribution was a subtle sweetness. Yang’s go-for-broke characters tended to convey a vulnerability that’s hard to achieve in sketch comedy. Take, for instance, the iceberg that sank the Titanic, who insisted on talking about his new album rather than about the 100-year-old tragedy. His plea was tinged with a mix of guilt and frustration, making him unexpectedly sympathetic. Or consider Barry, the self-absorbed midwife so miffed that he’d been forgotten by a colleague that he sows chaos in the delivery room: Yang, beneath a hilariously ever-growing wig, communicated through his body language Barry's fear of not being taken seriously.
As a Chinese American viewer of Saturday Night Live, I’ll concede that I initially paid close attention to Yang’s performances because of the traits that made his casting so significant. But as time went on, I watched him because he made his identity appear not like a burden he carried, but like a joy he embraced. Terry Sweeney, the show’s first openly gay cast member, spoke over the years about feeling pigeonholed during his single season; he was relied upon only to do impressions of female public figures or to deliver caricatures of his sexuality. Yang also played no shortage of such parts. But LGBTQ characters and performers have become more visible—and more dimensional—on the small screen in the decades since Sweeney was in the cast, and Yang was able to inject his roles with both personal specificity and wider resonance. The queer-coded slang—mentions of “poppers” and “twinks,” for example—in the Sara Lee sketch, in which he played a manager charged with disciplining a lustful employee who misused the company’s public Instagram, made its humor more nuanced. Yang’s mock competition with the actor Simu Liu, best known for being the first Asian star of a Marvel movie, poked fun at how goofy these milestones could sound, while also ribbing the expectations set by the model-minority stereotype. In other words, Yang drew from who he was, to his creative benefit.
His castmates channeled Yang’s own warm-but-boisterous brand of silliness last night, even in sketches from which he was absent—as in one where a group of squeaky-voiced Elf on the Shelf dolls discussed their trauma. The meta elements of Yang’s farewell appearance, meanwhile, resembled the many characters he embodied throughout his run, whose layers peeked through from underneath the farce. Comedy can sometimes seem antithetical to tenderness; it’s often easier for meanness to yield laughs, if the long history of roasts is any indication. But Yang unearthed sensitivity, helping the 50-year-old series, for which he earned five Emmy nominations, feel fresh. Like a 10-to-1 entry, he took unconventional swings. “I went into this being like, I’m just going to do whatever, and it kind of afforded me some latitude,” he told Vanity Fair last year. “That’s the whole point of the show: It’s a variety show.”