Bowen Yang explains his decision to leave ‘SNL’

Bowen Yang said he left “Saturday Night Live” in December after deciding he had reached the limit of what the show’s sketch format could offer him creatively. Speaking on a recent episode of his podcast “Las Culturistas,” Yang said he felt boxed into narrow archetypes during his eight-year run, particularly in roles written around race and sexuality. He added that leaving midway through Season 51 allowed him to exit on his own terms rather than extend his tenure by default.

During the episode, Yang discussed how broader instability across film and television factored into his thinking about when to step away. He said many performers remain in long-running roles out of necessity rather than choice, describing the current entertainment landscape as unpredictable and competitive. “The current entertainment ecosystem is so turbulent that people have completely valid reasons for staying longer, or in a lot of cases, don’t have the privilege of staying on as long as they would like to,” the 35-year-old comedian said.

Yang said his situation allowed him to make a different calculation. “I have this very beautiful thing where I get to say that I stayed on exactly as long as I wanted to,” he said, adding that he had been uncertain about returning the previous summer before deciding to complete one final stretch on the show.

Yang also responded to a critique he said followed him throughout his time on the show, that his performances lacked range. “I feel like I was really bogged down the entire time I was there about the idea that there was no range in anything I did,” he said. When co-host Matt Rogers called that assessment lazy, Yang said he understood how it formed. “I knew I was never gonna play the dad. I was never gonna play the generic thing in sketches. It’s a sketch show; each thing is like four minutes long. It is short and collapsed by necessity, so therefore it plays on archetypes.”

Yang joined “Saturday Night Live” as a writer in 2018, became a featured cast member the following season and was later promoted to the main cast. Over the course of his run, he earned five Primetime Emmy nominations and became the show’s first East Asian American cast member, a milestone he said carried both visibility and constraint.