Bowen Yang

Bowen Yang (born November 6, 1990, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia) is a Chinese American comedian, actor, podcaster, and writer who first gained wide recognition as a featured player—a lower-tier cast member—on the sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live (SNL; 1975– ) in 2019. Known for his witty, incisive, and absurd character portrayals, which often incorporate queerness without making it a punchline, Yang soon became an audience favorite. In 2021 he became the first SNL featured player to earn a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for acting. The same year, he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and became a repertory player (full-time cast) at SNL.

Early life and career

Yang is the younger of two children born to Ruilin Yang, an explosives engineer for the mining and infrastructure company Orica, and Meng Yang, who trained as an obstetrician before moving from China to Australia with her husband (she would later work in medical diagnostics). In 1991, when Yang was six months old, the family moved from Australia to Canada and settled in Brossard, a suburb of Montreal, Quebec. While living there the Yang family attended the Just for Laughs Montréal festival every year. Yang later said of the festival, “That was my first exposure to what different kinds of comedy sort of converging at the same point looked like, and it was just so thrilling. I, as a kid, really sort of lit up over it.”

In 1999 Yang’s family moved to Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, in the United States. His parents ensured that he grew up in contact with Chinese culture, sending him to Chinese school on Sundays and speaking Mandarin at home. He became enthralled by American television. In a 2024 interview with The New Yorker, Yang recalled having to adjust his basement television antenna to watch SNL each Saturday. As a freshman at Smoky Hill High School, he was introduced to the comedy of Korean American Margaret Cho when one of his friends played the album from her live comedy special, Notorious C.H.O. (2002). Finding a queer Asian American comedian was inspiring for Yang. He joined the high school’s improvisation troupe, called Spontaneous Combustion. Prior to graduating in 2008, he was voted “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live” by his classmates.

Yang began exploring his sexuality toward the end of high school, finding community online. After he accidentally left a chat window open on his family’s computer one day during his senior year, his parents found that he had been engaging in explicit conversations with men. They then signed him up for conversion therapy sessions and required that he complete them before being allowed to go to college out of state. Yang later said of the therapy, “It was just crazy. Explain the gay away with pseudoscience.”

In 2008 Yang enrolled at New York University (NYU). He took premed courses, which both pleased his parents and let him follow in the footsteps of Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), his favorite character in the television medical drama Grey’s Anatomy (2005– ). He continued to do improv comedy in his spare time, joining student improvisation group Dangerbox his freshmen year. After graduating in 2012 Yang decided not to go to medical school and instead started pursuing a career in comedy. He learned Photoshop and worked as a graphic designer to support himself and ended up working for One Kings Lane, a luxury home decor company, for five years. During that time he appeared as a guest on some comedy-oriented television shows and performed with the musical sketch comedy team Pop Roulette, which had been formed by his friend Matt Rogers, a former NYU classmate.

Yang and Rogers developed a podcast together in 2016 called Las Culturistas. Initially a platform on which they openly discussed such topics as their personal lives and pop culture, the ongoing podcast now features interviews with the celebrities they had raved about in early episodes. It quickly became popular in the gay community (of which both hosts are members), and by late 2024 it was being downloaded more than a million times per month.

Saturday Night Live

The beginning of Yang’s big breakthrough to stardom came in 2018, when he was hired as a staff writer for SNL’s 44th season. On that season’s 16th episode, which was hosted by Sandra Oh and aired on March 30, 2019, he made his first on-camera appearance parodying North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. The following season he became a featured player—the show’s first-ever Chinese American cast member and the third to be an openly gay man.

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As a featured player Yang gained notice when he portrayed the bedazzled diva of an iceberg that sank the Titanic. The segment quickly went viral, garnering almost three million views on YouTube in just over a month. It also earned Yang his first Emmy Award nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series in 2021. Yang was promoted to a full-time cast member that fall, and since then his standout characters have included a “proud gay” Oompa Loompa and a queer-coded Jafar, the villain from Disney’s Aladdin (1992). In 2019 he, along with the rest of the writers of SNL, was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety series. Yang received two more Emmy nominations, in 2022 and 2024, for his supporting work on the series.

Other work

Yang plays a successful Stanford graduate on the stoner comedy sitcom Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens (2020– ). He has appeared in comedic movies including Fire Island (2022) and Bros (2022). He lent his voice to a character in The Garfield Movie (2024) and portrayed Pfannee in the film adaptation of the musical Wicked (2024).