Live from New York, tomorrow is Bowen Yang's final SNL

The Saturday Night Live breakout and Wicked star Bowen Yang will make his final Studio 8H appearance as a cast member tomorrow night.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  December 19, 2025 | 2:11pm
(Photo by: Griffin Nagel/NBC)
TV News Bowen Yang
Live from New York, tomorrow is Bowen Yang's final SNL

TikTok won’t have Bowen Yang to spark controversies over Moo Deng anymore. After nearly a decade of writing and performing on Saturday Night Live, the show’s resident Iceberg That Sank The Titanic is capsizing his sketch comedy career and leaving the show. Deadline reports that tomorrow, December 20, will be Yang’s final episode, appropriately hosted by the Wickedly talented, one and only Ariana Grande. Yang joins fellow season 50 departures Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker, and Emil Wakim, who said buh-bye over the summer.

Since joining the show as a writer in 2018, Yang has become one of its most popular cast members and the first featured player in history to earn an Emmy nom for the show. Since then, he’s established himself as a formidable comedy star across various platforms, hosting the popular podcast Las Culturistas, which landed him and co-host Matt Rogers a Bravo special, and appearing as Pfannee in the Wicked movies. Yang’s busy schedule and growing celebrity, though, had begun to change his perspective on the show. Earlier this fall, Yang told People that he spoke to Lorne Michaels about potentially exiting SNL because he worried that the “audience is maybe getting sick of me.”

“Lorne [Michaels] and I talked about it, and Lorne was like, ‘You have more to do,’ and that means a lot, because I even confessed to him,” Yang said. “I was like, ‘I feel the audience is maybe getting sick of me.’ And he was like, ‘That’s not true. There’s more for you to do. I need you.'”

Sadly, Lorne’s need for Yang wasn’t enough. That’s a series wrap on Gay Oompa Loompa.

 
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