“I’m not saying that that snark gallery is flawed in the way that it has existed all this time, but it’s not necessarily that useful for me as a performer to mire myself in the snark of it all,” he says. “Not to draw this terrible capitalist simile, but SNL is Amazon and the sketches and the people in them are products, and everyone’s just leaving reviews — but in the way that Amazon reviews have this tone to them where it’s like, ‘Well, I hate this thing because it came in the mail broken.’ It’s that same frequency of people being like, ‘Let me come in hot with my take because they’re these granular units of things that I can attach my opinion onto because I’ll watch something and consume it within four minutes.’” Yang was also asked if SNL has a gay sensibility these days. “The thing about SNL is that it is this container for all sorts of different things to coexist,” he says. “I don’t think there’s this new phenomenon that there is a queer sensibility in the show all of a sudden. It’s been at a different volume maybe, and we turned some of those tracks up.”
TOPICS: Bowen Yang, NBC, Saturday Night Live