Bowen Yang is all-in with the “cringe” on Saturday Night Live.
The SNL cast member, on this week’s episode of his Las Culturistas podcast, weighed in after his co-host Matt Rogers declared that sometimes you have to “climb up a huge hill of cringe” following talk about the 2024 election.
“On the other end ... you slide down into happiness and nirvana,” Matt said.
“I know about working through cringe. Climbing a cringe mountain? I work at Saturday — fucking — Night Live, the cringiest thing in show business on every level,” Bowen later declared.
“Climbing cringe mountain, cringe mountain is SNL, eternally grateful that I work there, will be the defining thing of my life and career and yet it is a cringe mountain.”
Bowen joined the SNL cast in 2019 after he was hired as a writer one season prior.
The Emmy-nominated comedian, who made history as the first Chinese American to be on the SNL cast, added that people have “constantly” told him how much the show “sucks”.
“[They say] how bad it is, how it’s not as good as it used to be. For your career, that has to do something to you psychologically where you emerge and go, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’” he said.
Matt told his co-host that while he doesn’t think it’s “cringe”, it’s “cringe” to people in general due to the show’s popularity and its tendency to attract opinions.
“And it’s comedy and it’s subjective,” added Bowen, who is set to star as Pfannee in the Jon M. Chu-directed Wicked films later this year.
Matt later continued: “But on the other side of it, guess what Bowen, you get to actually, the visceral thing of people laugh, people feel good and that is why we’re doing this. And that is why America is worth saving so that we can protect people and live up to what this actually all is fucking about.”
Check out more of the Las Culturistas podcast here.