Bowen Yang officially said his goodbye to Saturday Night Live right before Christmas last year in a final sketch that included Ariana Grande, Cher and a lot of singing. It was a touching way to send the beloved cast member off, but apparently, it wasn’t the original plan he envisioned. In fact, the sketch changed quite a bit between the dress rehearsal and the final show thanks to one last note from longtime showrunner Lorne Michaels.
Yang was part of a panel discussion at USG University along with Liz Patrick, who directed his last SNL episode. During the conversation, Patrick asked Yang if Cher was always supposed to be in the sketch. Apparently she was added during the week following the first table read, but it was actually another change that had a far bigger impact on the overall tone.
In the sketch in question, Yang plays a guy in the Delta Lounge of an airport who runs an eggnog station. He’s about to retire and phones his wife to say he’s coming home. In between singing verses of “Please Come Home For Christmas,” he also serves customers, accidentally spraying them with a small amount of eggnog. In the final version of the sketch, those eggnog spills work as a little bit of comedic relief and levity, but in the dress rehearsal version, they were much messier and more elaborate.
Here’s a portion of Yang’s story, per IndieWire…
The machine was supposed to go haywire, and it was supposed to be gushing, and there was supposed to be kind of a fountainous sort of aspect to it where other cast was just slipping and falling in the back.
More specifically, Sarah Sherman and Mikey Day were apparently supposed to be a large background presence in the sketch. The original version apparently saw them slipping and sliding and making a mess, as the eggnog machine went haywire and essentially sprayed a fountain they couldn’t figure out how to stop. It sounds like a riot but also a pretty radical shift in tone from what we eventually got. After dress, Lorne Michaels approached Yang and his co-writer Celeste Yim and told them they should keep the sketch “tender.”
You can watch the version we got below and imagine how it might feel a bit different with Sherman and Day screaming their heads off and flopping around in a bunch of eggnog.
Yang was originally planning to leave Saturday Night Live following the SNL 50 season, but he was convinced to stay for part of a season by Michaels to help assimilate the new cast. That plan worked like a charm because some of the newer voices really started to emerge as budding stars, and Yang got a really sweet final moment to say goodbye to the show that earned him five Emmy nominations.
Fortunately, it feels like there's a pretty good chance we'll see Yang back on the Studio 8H stage at some point. A lot of the bigger cast members return to host the show at some point later in their careers and many more stop by for a cameo or an anniversary special. Fingers crossed it won't take him too long to come back.
