When his fluorescent white smile materializes in a Zoom window on my computer screen, the comedian-actor-podcaster-writer Bowen Yang has the restful glow of someone who, like nearly every other gay person in New York City, has spent the last several days reclining in the remote, sunbleached haven of Fire Island. “You really do feel like you’re far away from civilization when you’re here,” says Yang, and it’s that distance from the real world that makes The Pines such a mecca of queer American life—just 300 people live there in its off-season, but the island undergoes a metamorphosis of degeneracy in the closing weeks of August, when thousands descend upon it like biblical locusts to fuck and party and stretch the summer out to its maximum resolution. “I feel like I have this prolonged First Night Before School Syndrome,” says Yang, “and the vibes are suffused with expectation and nervousness and anxiety about wrapping up summer in the right way.”

This isn’t necessarily that all-too-common case of Terminal Adolescent Brain, when one’s circadian rhythm is incurably timed to the lapsed calendar of the school year. Bowen does, in fact, have a lot of plates spinning, fast-approaching responsibilities that will quickly dissipate the elusive mood of being a kid on furlough from his studies. Saturday Night Live, where he’s been a main cast member since 2019, is returning for its 50-year anniversary season beginning in September, just in time for the presidential election.

The first part of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked, in which Yang has a minor role as the conniving Pfannee to Ariana Grande’s Glinda the Good, is out in November. And then there’s the matter of all the other endeavors he’s been juggling: Las Culturistas, the hilarious award-winning podcast that Yang hosts with his best friend, Matt Rogers; the annual Culture Awards they host and which Yang has been pitching as “if a roast, a comedy special, and an actual awards show had a baby”; his starring role opposite Lily Gladstone in Andrew Ahn’s remake of The Wedding Banquet; and “some other stuff on the TV side of things.” 

To my ear, these are all crystal clear indicators that the four- time Emmy-nominated comedian has officially crash-landed in Hollywood like an alien emerging from a chrome spaceship now seeking cultural ubiquity, but it’s not an assertion he resonates with when I raise the question. “I really don’t feel like I’m dominating anything,” he promises, not without a slight note of exasperation. “I feel like this is all just some elaborate mistake!”

Certainly he doesn’t feel as if he’s been dominating Showtune Sundays at The Pavilion, where theater lovers worship at the altar of Broadway and competitively trade their esoteric knowledge of the most obscure musical deep cuts. “I feel like a fraud when I go,” says Bowen, “because I always thought that I knew musicals. But it turns out I’ve barely scratched the surface!” The difference, though, is that he’s also crossed the aisle from audience member to castmate. He relates to me a story that seems to capture the serendipity of his position—how, on his first-ever trip to New York City at 14, his parents couldn’t afford to see Wicked on Broadway at the Gershwin. “I begged my parents to drive me to the theater just so I could press my face against the glass,” he says. Later that day, they did an NBC studio tour at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, most notable for housing the live broadcast of SNL. “None of it necessarily felt like, ‘One day I’m gonna be here,’” he says, not nearly so dramatic as a wide-eyed ingénue arriving in a bustling city and promising to some day plant her flag there. “But for those to be the things that are now dominating my life is pretty crazy.”

It’s a neat, convenient visual metaphor that summarizes Bowen’s professional arc: the outsider has finally found his way inside, has phased through the glass and meandered past the unsuspecting doorman. Who else could have smuggled onto SNL a sketch where Harry Styles plays the gay, oversexed social media manager for Sara Lee Bread, who is fired for ruining the company’s reputation by writing comments like “wreck me daddy” under Nick Jonas photos,
and captioning images of grilled cheese with musings about “feeling really depressed after [a] threesome” while high off poppers at 4 AM. Or, a ridiculous impression of a queer-coded iceberg that sank the Titanic, who is far less interested in talking about the traumatic event of being attacked by the ocean liner than in promoting a new album (a “hyperpop EDM nu-disco fantasia,” simply titled, Music)?

This is also part of what makes Yang’s comedic sensibility—wry, cheerful, absurdist, distinctly queer—so infectious. Particularly if you’re accustomed to your queerness always being mined for comedic material, it’s refreshing to have Yang make you feel as if you’re finally in on the joke, even if you’re the one being skewered. Andrew Yang himself called it “an honor” to be impersonated by Bowen in an SNL sketch that staged a presidential debate; it takes a certain level of grace to make fun of someone without conveying any ill-will at all. “There’s this joy and absolute precision in Bowen’s comedy that’s so rare among comedians,” says Jaboukie Young-White, who describes Yang’s “genius” as a performer as “undeniable,” and admires his refusal, even in his social life, to ever punch down. “There’s never any malice at his target, but there’s this unflinching accuracy and gaze on whatever it is he’s sending up or making fun of. If you’re going to be made fun of or teased, I can’t imagine a better person than Bowen Yang doing it—because he’s often approaching it from a point of celebration, and that’s irresistible.”

Bowen never nursed any private dreams for showbiz, he says, but maybe it was always going to be this way. He discovered SNL when he was “geeked out on comedy” in middle school. Back then, he says, he would crush three episodes of The Simpsons (which he has since guest-starred on) every day, then stay up late to watch David Letterman’s show or bask in the glow of his hero Conan O’Brien, whose anti-cynical brand of stupid-brilliant humor gave Yang the blueprint for his own. In high school, his calculus teacher moonlit as the assistant director of a comedy theater in downtown Denver, and because Bowen was “very good at math by race,” he and the teacher developed a very close friendship, which led to his joining an improvisational comedy group. “I think that really helped me to develop this precocious sense of not caring if you look stupid or silly, because you’re a 14-year-old performing for beer-drinking 30-year-olds who would be like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’” he says. “It builds a tough shell for you to not really care about not looking silly in front of an audience.” (This is perhaps one reason, he says, that he was voted “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live” for his high school superlative.)

It’s not like queer comedians are at all a new phenomenon—we’ve always had Wanda Sykes and Margaret Cho and Paul Lynde and Rip Taylor. But there is a sense that Yang is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in comedy, in which queer comics are able to emerge through the form and then into other avenues of entertainment without having to sublimate their identities or tokenize themselves. Peter Knegt at the CBC recently diagnosed this movement as a “New Queer Comedy,” and many of its luminaries are people who also happen to be friends of Yang: Julio Torres, Joel Kim Booster, Ayo Edebiri, Young-White.

Bowen was recently connected with Terry Sweeney, the first openly gay male cast member on SNL, and while he says it’s nice to feel like he’s part of a Trojan horse wheeled into the institution, he’s very adamant about recognizing the bravura required to do drag impersonations on television in the mid-1980s, and how that boldness laid the groundwork for him and his contemporaries. “Sadly, maybe it was before the audience was ready for it,” he says.

But the audience is ready now. We’ve arrived at a juncture where a vista has opened. Bowen has climbed through it. And he seems keen to pull all of us through it with him.

Photographed by Matthew Tyler Priestley

Styled by Michael Fisher

Written by Connor Garel

Grooming: Jenny Sauce at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Sophie Elgort