Bowen Yang dove into his emotional Saturday Night Live farewell and reflected on his tenure at the show on the latest episode of his podcast with Matt Rogers, Las Culturistas.
The conversation marks Yang’s most in-depth since his final episode of SNL aired in December. For his finale, Yang got to reunite with Aidy Bryant and revive their Trend Forecasters bit on “Weekend Update.” And he got to close out the show with a poignant, thinly-veiled farewell sketch in which he played a Delta Lounge attendant serving eggnog on his last shift.
While doing that sketch, Yang said he felt the emotional weight of the moment when he delivered the line, “I’ve loved every single person who works here.” While Rogers joked that Yang “immediately broke down” because he “knew it was a lie,” Yang, laughing, insisted, “Because I was telling the truth!”
While Yang copped to the fact that the sketch was “completely indulgent,” he argued that doing a “straight joke bag” didn’t feel right.
“There are no other occasions for someone to say that at that place,” Yang said. Later, while fighting back tears, he added: “It just felt like a really beautiful thing where, as I get on the floor, I look out, and basically everyone who worked there was on the floor, showing up. I just looked out and I thought, ‘I’m so lucky that I ever got to work here. And I’m so lucky that I get to make this little statement that’s barely veiled where I love you all.’”
While such a send-off might seem inevitable, Yang said that, like all SNL sketches, he didn’t know if this one would air up until the moment it did. (He recalled past instances where skits had been cut when he was already in costume, about to go on stage.) Still, he said, he was “zen” about the sketch, having relished the opportunity to do it at the table read earlier that week, and because of the “outpouring” of support and love he felt that whole week.
Elsewhere, Yang reflected on his eight years at SNL, which began in 2018 when he was hired as a writer on Season 44. (He was promoted to a featured player the following season, and then the main cast in Season 47.) He acknowledged the show’s famously stressful and fraught environment, saying, “Working there is completely dysregulating, emotionally. Either you are soaring or you are, like, completely in the dumps.”
But he also spoke about learning to grapple with that pressure. By the end, he said, even a “light show” or a “bad week” felt manageable, because he’d realized that “comfort is not necessarily the point of being here.” He added: “There’s such a beautiful crucible of that show. And now that I”m done with it, now that I’m through the gauntlet of it, I’m like, that is one of the most meaningful experiences I ever had.”
