Bowen Yang and Kenan Thompson address Shane Gillis, Dave Chappelle SNL moments
Bowen Yang and Kenan Thompson discuss some of the most controversial Saturday Night Live episodes of the 49th season
Aux News Gillis
Bowen Yang seems to have learned well the lesson Tina Fey imparted upon him earlier this year: “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” Whatever personal problems he may have had with hosts and guests on Saturday Night Live this season (i.e., Dave Chappelle, Nikki Haley, and Shane Gillis), he’s keeping those problems personal. In a new interview with Variety, both he and co-star Kenan Thompson elegantly sidestepped airing any true dirty laundry about the show’s direction.
First, they addressed Dave Chappelle randomly jumping on stage for the goodnights of the Dakota Johnson-hosted episode, during which Chappelle did not appear. Yang clarified that he wasn’t keeping his distance from the stand-up as some outlets reported (“I stand where I always stand on good nights. It was not a physical distance that anyone was creating”), but he was “confused” in the moment, which Thompson also describes as “jarring.” However, as far as the “controversy” (as Thompson deems it) of the next two episodes with Haley and Gillis, Yang diplomatically said, “I’m going to give Lorne Michaels some credit to that meta-narrative. There’s a story around the show now, and it’s his show. He gets to do whatever he wants.”
In other words, don’t blame the Not Ready For Primetime Players, blame the gamemaster. Yang expressed justifiable discomfort with the way his career has been tied to Gillis’, due to the fact that they were hired for SNL at the same time but Gillis was fired before ever appearing in an episode. “Anytime our names are in the same sentence, at least in a journalistic way, it always feels deleterious. It feels like one person is trying to undo the other. I was just really curious about what that show would be like and if it would be an opportunity to really move past it,” Yang explained. “I think he and I have done enough things in our careers now to really not [have] that be the definitive beginning or the thing that casts a pall over everything else that we do going forward.”
Of course, though Gillis’ star continued to rise without the platform of being an SNL cast member, he never fully quit the brand of problematic comedy that got him fired in the first place. That didn’t stop Netflix from giving him a sitcom, but as Yang noted to Variety, comedy is subjective. “Everybody is highly personal about what they find funny, so it’s everyone’s value systems meeting at the same time. That makes it completely ripe for conflict.” He then corrected himself: “Not conflict. I always boil it down to a healthy discussion about what’s going on in the world.” Hey, if you’re having a conversation that’s guaranteed to spread far and wide across the Internet, it makes complete sense to conduct that conversation verrrrrry carefully.
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I feel like there are a lot of people who see Yang and project on him all their feelings and political beliefs. I don’t read Yang to be expressing discomfort with Gillis, necessarily. His concern seems to be that, because they were set to join SNL at the same time, their names are linked in people’s minds. When the two are mentioned together, “[i]t feels like one person is trying to undo the other.” That seems more like a concern that people (cough cough, AV Club) are falsely trying to turn Yang into a symbol of LGBT, multicultural liberalism, and Gillis into a symbol of straight, white MAGA-ism, and pit them against each other.
It’s funny because as far as i can tell, Yang and Gillis are if not friends, at least friendly. I heard some podcast or something with NYC comedians talking about this (there are so many now and they all cross-breed, i don’t remember which one) saying that the two are cool with each other
I certainly get the sense that Yang is liberal, but it doesn’t necessarily follow from that that he’s outraged by all the things that liberal online spaces are angry about. Comedians tend to be pretty forgiving about other comedians’ jokes, since a whole lot of the job involves saying things that you think will generate a reaction and learning that some of them don’t work.Also, Yang may recognize that it doesn’t make sense to generate a reputation of Guy Who We Go To To Declare That Things Aren’t Funny. Is that a guy whose comedy show you really want to see, even if you share many of his values?
Where do you get these “senses,” though? From the live showings of SNL, or interviews like AVClub, and/or something more? You sound like someone who doesn’t know him at all.
Yeah, I definitely feel like a lot of people/outlets (definitely the AV Club) are trying to make Yang’s approval the barometer by which celebrities are judged… at least when it comes to SNL. Like damn, stop trying to dissect what him standing offstage means. Definitely feels like trying to drum up artificial drama.
Has Bowen Yang said anything about Jerry Seinfeld by any chance?
I’m sure the second he does it’ll be front page news here on the AVC. Sneak preview:
Bowen Yang slams controvery-riddled Jerry Seinfeld
Yang tweeted: “Unfrosted wasn’t very funny”.
I can’t tell if “controvery” was intentional.
… uh… yeah, it definitely was! That’s what I’ll go with! Definitely not a typo!
Good time to make a typo.
That headline is way too measured, short, and doesn’t have enough instantly dated slang that elder millenials use as desperate appeals to Gen Z.Bowen Yang, like all of us, thinks Jerry Seinfeld is totally cringe and just needs to go away for a while.
Well he wouldn’t be wrong in the event he did say that…
Yeah he said he 100% agrees with me about Seinfeld and all other topics.
“because they were set to join SNL at the same time, their names are linked in people’s minds”Which is strange to me because I had *literally* never heard of Shane Gillis prior to his being announced as a host, and I am a weekly watcher of SNL. So I’m surprised that anyone considers the two together at all. I can’t imagine that the business of Gillis being hired and fired was that huge a deal because, again, I’m an SNL fan and I see the news about it. If there was any it seems it was a blip. Are people really walking around thinking about Bowen Yang and Gillis being hired at the same time on a regular basis?
I think interviewers and new sources tend to focus on questions likely to generate controversy and attention. You don’t get links to your interview if you ask Yang if it was fun working with Emma Stone, and he confirms that yes, it was fun working with Emma Stone.I did not recognize Gillis either. But culture is so fractured nowadays that I think it’s hard for SNL to find people who are universally famous (particularly when they’re likely saving some of those people for season 50). My sense is that Gillis is at least as well known as, say, Ayo Edebirii. It’s just that the people who watch The Bear tend to be different from the people who watch Gillis.
Sure, but that’s different to what Yang is talking about. He’s specifically talking about their names being linked because they were hired at the same time. That’s not the same as asking him about Gillis because of his comments on gay people.And yeah I hadn’t heard of Ayo Edebirii either, but I’m not saying Gillis isn’t famous. That’s not my point. He may or may not be as far as I know. I just don’t think his fame is in any way linked to Bowen Yang’s. Or, I should say, I haven’t seen evidence of that, but Yang seems to think it’s happening so I guess he would know better than I.
They were linked because 1) they were announced as new cast members on the same day and 2) the thing that got Gillis in trouble was the use of an Asian slur on a podcast episode. That’s why they’re linked, along with the fact that both have gotten steadily more famous in the years since. Chloe Fineman was also announced on the same day and she doesn’t get linked the same way.
I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of him, because it did make quite a splash at the time. I was in an SNL fantasy league at that point (everyone who likes SNL should do this—it’s so fun! It’s mainly host prediction) and we were all atwitter, but I remember reading about it here as it was happening independently of that group of people.
Hey now, he is the first “openly bottom” Asian American on People’s “Sexiest Men Alive” list!
You have no way of knowing that unless you are close enough to him to have that convo.
I’m reading the words on the page, the same way the AV Club author did. I think the author’s reading is uncompelling, for the reasons I explained.Do you have a different reading? Or do want us to both ask Bowen Yang in person, so we can be qualified to post a comment on a story online about a TV show.
as much as i’d like Kenan’s first name to be spelled like my last name Keenan — his first name is spelled Kenan
Proofread schmoofread, this is BREAKING NEWS!… about two SNL episodes from months ago. The world’s waiting with baited breath for the opinions of these guys!… well, one of them, the one whose name the author can bother to get right.
bated
You should adopt him and change his name to Keenan Keenan.
I love how Bowen Yang and Shane Gillis appear to be friends, but some of his fans and this writer are so heartbroken by that that they need to concoct this narrative that secretly he HATES Shane but is just pretending to be okay with him for reasons.“Bowen secretly agrees with me that Shane should not host, but he just will never say that, but trust me, he totally does.” – Mary Kate Carr
“She’s only with that guy because she knows, deep down, that she’s in love with me, and those feelings are so strong that they scare her, and drive her to act like she barely knows I exist.”
Projection.
Please don’t link to an ‘article’ by Seth Simons. That person is nowhere close to a legitimate news source!
His bird poetry is top notch. But his sex pesting leaves a lot to be desired.
“Bowen Yang and Keenan Thompson address Shane Gillis, Dave Chappelle SNL moments.”…“In a new interview with Variety, both he and co-star Keenan Thompson elegantly sidestepped airing any true dirty laundry about the show’s direction.”So what you’re saying is they did not, in fact, truly address any of those things.
Seriously. I wish I could take back my pageview, because all it does is feed more of these articles.
Clickbait headline is clickbait.
Meet the new AV Club, same as the old AV Club. (But not the same as Classic AV Club. That’s gone and will likely never come back.)
Means, meet the new AV Club, the same as the old AV Club from 7-8 years ago. But starkly a world different than the OG AV Club from 2005. We don’t even talk about the dinosaur era AV Club circa 1993.
used to read that in the boston phoenix back in the day, iirc (memory a bit fuzzy – could’ve been the Onion.. or maybe both)there are dozens of us! dozens!
you know, Avclub turned into a hard core gossip rag so gradually i barely noticed
As much as I say “Please shut the fuck up and go away until you’re done with the transphobic shit, Dave”, it DID strike me as just Yang, and most of the cast, being caught off guard by what was essentially party crashing.
Yang is too much of a coward to ever do anything like that. He’s a pathetic careerist loser.
I don’t know if using a Seth Simons article is a good idea. I agree with his opinions usually, but he ended up being so completely tricked in his New Republic article that it’s like letting Brian Williams keep talking about the Iraq War.
I can’t believe this motherfucker (and alleged sex pest, lest we forget) has the gall to say he writes about labor in comedy, as that would give the impression of him being pro-labor. And yet all he really does is try to get comedians fired and venues shut down.
“Anytime our names are in the same sentence, at least in a journalistic way, it always feels deleterious”Oh like this article is doing right now?Just let it go. Yang’s career is going well as is Gillis’. Everyone wins.
I don’t know who at the AV Club needs to be told this, but Bowen Yang will not fuck you no matter how many articles you write about them.
Cowards. Losers. At least they know their place. Good boys.
So because he doesn’t meet your outrage expectations in this interview, Yang must be inauthentic. It’s certainly not that he’s exhausted by the constant questions and articles about how he was standing for 30 seconds.Very cool AVClub. Never change from the shallow gossip rag you’ve turned yourself into.
Yet another oversized number of comments. Do you all have alerts for when your boy gets mentioned?
The truly problematic thing about Gillis’ comedy is that it’s just not funny.
Being scared of Lorne is so elegant.Hey, I’ve seen it in people like Bob Odenkirk who got out of his orbit decades ago. They still don’t want to talk about it….
“problematic comedy”fuck you.comedian can’t take a joke, film at 11
God forbid people have opinions about comedy! It’s not like they were screaming about how they want to take free speech rights away from people, that would be you. I know it’s a difficult concept for you to grasp because you are an incredibly selfish asshole, but when you aren’t an asshole you don’t tent to like comedy that punches down.
“punches down” = prog pussy talk for comedians who sit down to pee. you’re a fucking faggot pussy. EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE IN COMEDY, YOU FUCKING JOYLFESS FAG.AND FUCK ME FOR NOT WANTING TECH OLIGARCHS TO CONTROL COMMUNICATION, UNLIKE YOU, YOU FUCKING ALL-THE-WAY-UP-THE-ASS BOOTLICKING CUNT. NECK YOURSELF.
It actually means this: to attack or criticize someone who is in a worse or less powerful position than you:If a comedian punches down, they make fun of people who are less powerful or privileged.But there is nothing you love more than inventing your own definitions for words so you can be an asshole and look stupid!
People can say whatever they want, social consequences are how the free market works bucko, stop crying when people don’t like something that was said. I know it sucks to have people constantly point out what a absolute prick you are at all times, but maybe don’t be so odious?
You screamed you want to take free speech rights away from people. That they were rich people does not excuse your tyranny and illiberalism. FB deciding what content they want on their platform is not “tech oligarchs controlling communication”. You are a hypocrite constantly squirming and trying to excuse your blatant hypocrisy.
It’s not “bootlicking” to think that ALL PEOPLE DESERVE THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS DIPSHIT. EAT SHIT YOU ILLIBERAL TOTALITARIAN.