Quotes from Bowen Yang

I think any gay comedian will acknowledge the fact that he or she is gay - it's not a coincidence, it's deeply who they are.

My dad every now and then will toe that line and be like, You could try women!' And I'm like Don't. It's almost an endearing kind of homophobia, if such a thing exists.

The way I see queerness now is that, best case scenario, another queer person reflects it back at you. Worst case scenario, which is what happened to me, is having people say, Well, you like Michelle Branch, so you must be gay.'

No, broadly speaking there is no average age in comedy, which is very refreshing. Any stress over success vis-a-vis age in comedy is just a matter of giving up short-term gains in favor of the long haul.

Everything is telling me that I should not do this, and yet I still do it. That is nightlife for a lot of gay people and the worst thing nightlife can be, which is compulsory.

After high school, I really learned to love myself. I finally stopped getting bullied by straight people. Then, I pretty much immediately started getting tormented by gay people for my taste in music.

There's this joke that Anna Drezen wrote for Melissa Villasenor, where Melissa plays every teen-girl murder suspect on Law & Order.' And there's this joke in there that is like, We stabbed her as a joke, but she took it the wrong way and started bleeding!'

It's a big deal to have Peppermint and Jiggly, two trans women, be on a pre-taped sketch for Saturday Night Live.'

There have been times where I have said, even in a sketch that I'm not in, 'I don't think you should be making that joke at the expense of Asian people.'

A few years ago I was participating in a comedic 'Inner Beauty Pageant' and I had to figure out a talent very last-minute. I always loved Tyra Banks's 'We were all rooting for you!' moment, and so I decided to lip-sync live to the six-minute entirety of it as my talent.

And I would go on all these college tours. And I was thinking about where I would want to go. And at the end of each tour, I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you guys have any improv groups?'

Being an Asian person on SNL,' when people are like, 'Why did it take so long?' It's sort of a question that doesn't fully understand the idea that there is no developmental experiential process for a queer Asian person to get into comedy in a way that feels inevitable.

I feel like 'SNL' is this kind of fixed, refractive prism. And whatever comes through it is just whatever - is just the absurdity of what's going on in the world or what people are saying or what's not being said.

It's not to say that, like, my sensibility is being sort of policed in any way. It's just I am trained at SNL' to think about the general audience. That's a unique aspect of SNL' - that everyone has an opinion on it from every generation.

I was 8, and I was probably too young for it, but that's when I started to watch SNL.' That's when I got a sense of what American humor was.

I'm just a comedian. I don't have all the answers. But I'm not just looking for them online. I'm looking around me.

I don't get too, like, you know, freaked out or nervous around famous people. But for some reason, Yvonne Orji is just one of those people where I'm like, I'm too - I would be too nervous to meet her.

I was the kid who at 12 years old went to NBC studio tours, and I would just answer all these trivia questions on the tour that the pages would ask about 'SNL'. I was that kid.

When I go to Fire Island, it's always sort of the same thing. Everyone is coexisting, and isn't that nice? But also, the risk of people co-opting what is a queer invention is okay, as long as it's not for capital.

A lot of different people under the queer umbrella come together but Like there's something inherently queer about the heist genre, in some way. It's about just flying under the radar and procuring something furtively or, you know, that thing that is just so fun and high-stakes in the way that a lot of queer experiences are.

Pride for me has always been about holding a personal vigil within your own relationship, with nuclear being under the queer umbrella or being an ally wherever you land.

Just classic immigrant story - I mean, child of immigrant story - did not grow up with cable and so felt constantly like I was being spoken to in a foreign language when I would go to school. And people would be like, did you watch this? Did you watch that? I'd be like, no, but I did watch 'SNL.'

There's some humility that has to be constant. And if I ever put pressure on myself to represent in any meaningful way for Asian people, then that would just get in my way in terms of thinking that I am destined to speak on behalf of multiple people.

We tell ourselves, It's important to get a sense of what people are saying about me.' But it really feeds some narcissistic impulse to check and see if people like you.