Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang recalls hamming it up in high school and reaping rewards for his gregarious ways.
During an interview with Terry Gross, the host of NPR‘s Fresh Air noted that Yang had been named homecoming king.
“So I figure either it was a very gay-friendly school or you were very successful at staying in the closet,” Gross inquired.
Yang, who grew up in Canada and Colorado, laughed and said, “I would say yes to the first part, definitely no to the second part — not successful at all.”
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“I think there’s this common trend among a lot of queer men my age who end up in some communications-forward position,” he continued, “whether it’s, like, they are the hosts of shows, or they’re actors, or they’re writers, or they are somewhat public-facing — a lot of us did the morning announcements, and a lot of us were on the homecoming court.”
He added, “And so I don’t know what that says about a certain type of, like, gregarious gay male growing up in the aughts, but I feel proud to be in that cohort of people. This is a thing.”
Yang, who has said that his parents found out he was gay when he was 17 and sent him to gay conversion therapy, explained that he was also named the equivalent of class clown in high school.
“They put the verbiage of ‘Most likely to be on SNL,'” Yang explained. “And it was — I think it’s totally incidental. It’s their way of calling me a hammy kid, basically, which I was. I never, ever, ever set my sights on SNL, but I was only the most enthusiastic fan. I would bring VHS tapes to school to, like, put them in.”
He then paused to explain what tapes were to kids today.
“You would play them,” the cohost of the Las Culturistas podcast teased. “And I would just bring those in and just, like, show people when there was a substitute teacher in class one day or something. Like, ‘Hey, I brought, like, this past weekend’s SNL, if people want to watch it. And somehow these teachers let me play it a handful of times, and I can’t believe I got away with it. But I was just very granularly obsessed with comedy and with SNL especially.”
Yang joined the Lorne Michaels show as a writer in 2018, then became the show’s first Chinese-American cast member, in 2019. He’s since been nominated for five Emmys; four times for best supporting actor and once for his writing.
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Yang has also appeared in other series, including Overcompensating and Girls5Eva, as well as the movies The Wedding Banquet and Wicked.
So when he was emotional on the final SNL episode of season 50 in May, fans were concerned that he wouldn’t be back.
“I think you get to a point at SNL where you understand that you’re on the downswing of things,” Yang told Entertainment Weekly in May. “I think I was just processing that being one of the last ‘last nights’ that I would have, and that is a huge thing.”
But he wouldn’t say if he planned to come back for season 51.
Listen to Yang’s full conversation on Fresh Air above.
