Saturday Night Live typically has one cast member who defines an era with offbeat character work. In the mid 2000s, it was Kristen Wiig with Gilly and the Target Lady, followed by Cecily Strong’s Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, and then by Kate McKinnon with, well, too many characters to name.
As of Saturday night’s Rami Malek-hosted episode, we now have a new leading comic whose stellar character work will be the talk of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
It’s officially the Bowen Yang years.
After making waves as the iceberg that sank the Titanic, the newly-minted full-time cast member has done it again with a portrayal of an openly gay Oompla Loompa eager to share his thoughts on Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka.
Ostensibly, Yang’s green-coiffed chocolate factory worker was stopping by “Weekend Update” to discuss a forthcoming labor strike. But co-anchor Colin Jost accidentally outed Yang’s character on national television by introducing him as a “proudly gay Oompa Loompa,” prompting a live public reckoning with the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Loompa now know their son is gay.
“They live in Loompa Land,” the outed Oompa Loompa says. “It’s not as progressive as here. They, like, just got Will & Grace.”
The sketch is painfully hilarious in large part because Yang imbues an otherwise ridiculous character with a hilarious degree of grace and humanity. We really feel for the gay Oompa Loompa — which is, in and of itself, a bizarre sentence to write!
But it was the gay Oompa Loompa’s thoughts on Timothée Chalamet’s forthcoming Wonka reboot that proved to be most memorable. After set photos of Chalamet as the famed factory owner and top-hat wearer went viral, the character was quickly dubbed
“Twonka,” a portmanteau for “twink Wonka.”
The gay Oompa Loompa agreed that “Twonka” was, indeed, as “yummy as lickable wallpaper,” before breaking out into a rant about his unethical labor practices: “The man doesn’t know how to make chocolate, OK? He doesn’t! He’s an ideas man who’s never touched a machine.”
This is just the latest iconic character Yang has brought to life on SNL. Last season, he revealed the iceberg that sank the Titanic doesn't believe he did anything wrong.
“First of all, you came to where I live and you hit me,” the iceberg complained. “It was midnight, I was chilling.”
He has also played a member of a Costco pop trio alongside Kim Kardashian-West and Aidy Bryant and impersonated Fran Lebowitz. And, of course, let’s not forget his Sara Lee corporate Instagram sketch, which gave us an unforgettable line reading of the phrase, “Must get rid of toxic in community.”
It’s great to see Yang soar on the show, after first joining as a writer in 2018. In a short span of time, he’s become a reliable source for the funniest queer sketches on TV.
Last year as a featured player, Yang received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He made history twice with his nomination as both the first Chinese American to be nominated in the category and the first SNL featured player to receive an individual Emmy nomination for their work on the show.
It’s Bowen Yang’s world, and it’s a true gay fantasy that we get to live in it.
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