Bowen Yang is getting tired of seeing the same old joke.
The “Saturday Night Live” star divulged during the latest episode of his “Las Culturistas” podcast that fans on TikTok keep tagging him in posts about completely unrelated people who happen to also be Asian.
“TikTok, or at least my experience of it … is, I log on and 20 of my notifications are of someone who thinks they’re being cute, tagging me and saying, ‘Oh my God. This person looks just like Bowen Yang,’” he said on the latest episode of the podcast.
“It’s an Asian person. It’s a little Asian baby dancing around in, like, a little elephant costume,” Yang continued. “Trust me. I’ve seen it. You guys can stop tagging me in that. No, thank you. It makes me not want to use the platform.”
Yang has co-hosted his podcast with Matt Rogers since 2016, and was recruited as an “SNL” writer two years later. He became the first Chinese American cast member in 2019.
“I guess that’s just not gonna go away,” he said on the podcast. “I guess I have to accept this as part of my life. But like, I even still get Asian people who make the Joel Kim Booster jokes, which are rude.”
Many fans have commented over the years that Yang and his former “Fire Island” co-star look alike, even though Booster, who is Korean American, has a much more athletic build and an entirely different face. Yang said it’s “a weird thing and I hate the internet because of it.”
“I think this is a great reason to leave,” he said.
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Still, Yang chalked much of the offensive tagging up to ignorance rather than malice, and said many fans “don’t see a lot of Asian people in their everyday lives,” prompting them to immediately think of Yang when they see another Asian person online.
Whether he’ll actually stop using TikTok or social media in general remains to be seen. But the 34-year-old has his hands full, most recently starring in the movie adaptation of “Wicked” opposite Ariana Grande.
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In an Interview Magazine conversation last week, Yang rued having to fly back and forth from New York to London every week to shoot his scenes in the box office hit — but said, “it’s the honor of my life to do this movie and ‘SNL’ at the same time.”