PRIDE: Bowen Yang on Pride, making SNL history and the transformative power of Michelle Branch
.” “For the first ‘at home’ show, everyone in the cast was texting each other, and I sent pictures of the Saratoga Springs bottles that the pages have at their desks,” the 29-year-old comedian recalled recently over Zoom from his Brooklyn apartment. “It’s all the little things I took for granted … I would give anything to experience all that, safely, again.” Until then, he’s “dreaming in little Zoom boxes,” trying to stay creative and connected.
By the time his promotion to cast member was announced in fall 2019, Yang was almost too exhausted to absorb it. “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. “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.
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. Yang’s acidic, pithy takes on pop culture and celebrity are now his bread and butter.
Yang doesn’t remember a specific time when he had a lightbulb over the head “I’m gay” moment. What he does remember is others pointing it out for him with mocking sneers, which made it all too easy to internalize the idea that he was messing up just by being himself. “The way I see queerness now is that, best case scenario, another queer person reflects it back at you,” he explains.
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