Bowen Yang, a comedian at Saturday evening live, was criticized for lacking “range” in his comedy. Now that he’s left the sketch comedy show, he directly addressed the criticism.
“I feel like the whole time I was there I was really stuck thinking there was no coverage in anything I did,” he says on the radio. Las Culturistas podcast.
The comedian further notes that sketch comedy is based on archetypes, suggesting that he cannot show his depth in such a genre.
“I knew I would never play the father. I would never play the generic thing in sketches. It’s a sketch show; each thing is about four minutes. It’s short and collapsed by necessity, so that’s why it plays on archetypes,” he says.
These archetypes, in turn, seemingly tied his hands, Bowen says SNLbecause every time he tried an out-of-the-box character, it fell flat.
“These archetypes also have a relationship to generic things, and there is a genericness in whiteness and in the fact that they are a canvas to build on. I came in pre-stressed and pre-painted.”
He continues, “People were overdetermining what I was, which was, ‘Oh, that’s just the gay Asian guy on ‘SNL.’ So every time I tried to work outside of that, it was completely ignored or it still got collapsed into, ‘Oh, he’s gay and Asian like always.'” (Yang was the very first Asian cast member of “SNL.”)
It’s worth noting that Bowen is the first Asian cast member of Saturday evening live.
