People Always Tell Bowen Yang How Much ‘SNL’ Sucks

To make it to the top, you’ve got to overcome the mortification, according to Matt Rogers on the latest edition of the Las Culturistas podcast. “You have to sometimes climb up a huge hill of cringe,” Rogers explained. “And once you can scale that hill — which might be your judgment on yourself, it might be your judgment on what you’re doing, it might be everyone saying what you’re doing is cringe — on the other end, you slide down into happiness and nirvana.” 

Hey, Rogers, you don’t have to tell that to Bowen Yang, a comic who has lived that particular struggle. “I know about working through cringe, climbing Cringe Mountain,” Yang responded. “I work at Saturday Fucking Night Live, the cringiest thing in show business on every level.” 

“Cringe Mountain is SNL,” he continued about his current employer. “Eternally grateful that I work there, will be the defining thing of my life and career. And yet, it’s a cringe mountain because to live through working at SNL and to have people constantly tell you how much it sucks, how bad it is, how it’s not as good as it used to be… For your career, that has to do something to you psychologically where you emerge and go, I don’t give a fuck.”

It’s a phenomenon not isolated to Yang. From approximately Season Three onward, fans and critics have bashed Saturday Night Live for not being as good as it used to be. A Newsday columnist declared the show Saturday Night Dead (a witticism that would be recycled many times over the years) in 1980. After Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman left, another critic said the show had become “a lifeless, humorless corpse.” Entertainment Weekly said watching SNL had become “an arduous ordeal” in 1994. The New Yorker predicted imminent cancelation in 2014 and just a couple of years ago, former cast member Rob Schneider said Kate McKinnon’s tribute to Hillary Clinton effectively killed the show.  

And yet, here we are. In any event, Rogers defended the show that Yang insisted was “a cringey job.”

“I don’t think it’s cringe,” Rogers said. “But I will say that everyone has a fucking opinion. It’s the most popular show in the world. It’s now been on for 50 years. It is capital C, commercial culture and therefore it’s cringe because everyone is like, ‘I’m having something to say.’” 

“And it’s comedy, and it’s subjective,” agreed Yang.  

“But on the other side of it, guess what, Bowen? You get … the visceral thing of people laugh, people feel good,” Rogers replied. “And that is why we’re doing this, and that is why America is worth saving.” 

SNL also gives Yang an opportunity to comedically strike back at his critics. He was saying the quiet part out loud when he appeared as a spotted lanternfly on Weekend Update in 2022. “Y’all don’t even know me,” Yang/Lanterfly chided the audience. “Boo me, haters! Y’all haters can kiss my ass!”