1/7/2024 0 Comments Bowen yang![]() This is all kind of a new thing, and I’m trying not to erase and destroy what people like Margaret Cho have accomplished, or what Alec Mapa has done as a queer Asian comedian. And I don’t know where that’s going yet I have no foresight into what it will be like. ![]() Now what’s happening is that, on a collective scale, everyone’s kind of getting on the same page - we’re catching up to some baseline understanding about what the material realities are for Asians in the business. What does this moment feel like for you?īowen: I think, for a long time, Asian people would be used as an existential punch line. Now our culture has evolved to where people are trying to correct for the fact that performers of color and LGBTQ+ performers have been criminally underrepresented. It was like, Why can’t the goofy, unattractive person ever be the lead? So, in my work over the years, I tried to prove that that was possible, because the non-cool guy as the lead wasn’t available in the culture when I was young. When I first started, I felt unrepresented in Hollywood. Judd: It must be an interesting moment for you. And also, the performance style is you’re pitching to the rafters and you’re screaming and you’re reading off a cue card. ![]() But even now I’m realizing, Oh the credits don’t transfer from SNL, because none of it is made like this. Nothing gets made like that anymore except for summer stock theater. Once you get past that initial challenge, there’s still the precariousness of the movie business, where you could commit the time to get a movie going, and you still don’t know if someone will want to make it happen.īowen: All of that runs counter to the SNL process, where there’s such an efficiency with how things are made. It’s daunting to figure out, How does this character or persona work in a full story, in a full movie? That has been the challenge for some SNL people: It’s about figuring out who you are separate from your characters. You have to write, because nobody will be able to write the thing for you that you probably should be doing. But that was all his rehearsal for Barry. He said that he was writing like seven screenplays over the course of his time at SNL, of which none were made. And I did it with Bill, where he worked on a screenplay for us and with some writers from SNL, and we just never cracked it. Or taken the effort to ask themselves, What else can I do with my talent and ideas?īowen: I think I heard the legend that you told Bill Hader, maybe during his second season of SNL, that he had to start putting the wheels in motion then so that things will bear fruit further down the line. Judd: Sometimes I go to a comedy club and see all these hilarious people onstage, and I wonder if they’ve ever sat down and written a sketch or a screenplay. My awful snobbery with people who are working in comedy is This can’t be your plan B. Pierson, and we were just like, “This is the future.” And we put in the work early on and just started to write. Recent alums of note from NYU at that point were, like, Donald Glover and D.C. I was in the improv group, and he was in the sketch group, and we were both just obsessed with comedy. We were both in the closet at NYU, which was just such a funny place to be in the closet, especially circa 2008. How did you two meet?īowen: Matt and I met in college. Judd: I want to talk about Las Culturistas, the podcast you’re doing with Matt Rogers. Here’s Apatow’s chat with Yang from June 2021, excerpted from Sicker in the Head. ![]() While there are a few vintage interviews (like John Candy from 1984), Sicker is comprised primarily of brand-new material compiled over the last few years with legends (John Cleese, Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Cho, Mort Sahl) and modern humorists excitingly redefining comedy, like Ramy Youssef, Hannah Gadsby, Amber Ruffin, and Bowen Yang, co-host of the Las Culturistas podcast and the person responsible for some of the most memorable and viral Saturday Night Live sketches in years. Six years later comes the sequel, Sicker in the Head: More Conversations About Life and Comedy. Those interviews, along with some newer ones, were the foundation for Apatow’s 2016 book Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, a collection of insightful conversations about the art and practice of being funny. For his entire professional life, he’s worked for, with, and alongside comedy greats, a behavior that goes back to his days as a talk-show host, interviewing ’80s stand-ups like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld for his high school’s radio station. Photo: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Imagesīefore he made emotionally resonant, character-driven comedy films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Trainwreck, Judd Apatow wrote for landmark comedy television shows like The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and Freaks and Geeks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |