‘Saturday Night Live’ Fans Have New Cast Quitting Theories After Colin Jost Rumors Fizzle
Weekend Update, but will he need a new iceberg for the Titanic?
Contrary to what many yet another brutal joke swap segment as they shamefully snickered their way into the off-season with no mention of the wave of “Colin Jost is retiring” tweets, articles and Instagram Stories that preceded the night’s show.
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Of course, the fact that Jost didn’t derail the historic SNL finale with an on-air resignation doesn’t mean that the Weekend Update great can’t just quietly pack his things during the summer break. However, the last SNL episode until September did give fans juuuust enough dramatics to start a new wave of rumors regarding another beloved veteran’s possible departure, which means that it’s only a matter of time before we get the social media counter-narrative of “Will Bowen Yang take over for Lorne Michaels?”
As SNL fans across social media noticed, Yang seemed to have more than one emotional moment with a castmate during the traditional SNL goodnights on Saturday. A fan in the SNL subreddit generated divisive discussion and speculation with their post about Yang and Sarah Squirm’s misty embrace, writing, “I’m not one to read too much into things, but that doesn’t look like the face of a Sarah who is celebrating the end of a successful season. I cast my vote that Bowen’s about to spread his wings.”
“It’s the look of leaving. I don’t think Bowen will be returning,” another fan wrote of Yang’s pained expression during the credits.
“Watching from the live audience, Bowen did seem to have a lot of intense hugs with a lot of people during good nights,” one more concurred. “After the feed cut off, him and Marcello got really close and eye-to-eye.”
Yang, who ed SNL as a writer in 2018 before ing the cast a year later, has certainly achieved non-SNL stardom during his time on the show, which could play a factor in his future at 30 Rock. Over the last few years, Yang and Matt Rogers’ podcast Las Culturistas became a veritable cultural institution itself — the duo will be filming the 2025 Las Culturistas Culture Awards for both Peacock and Bravo this July.
And just last month, Yang told PEOPLE that he’s starting to think about what the future holds for him, reflecting on the recent SNL50 anniversary special, “Especially after the 50th, I’m seeing what life after the show is like and how beautiful it is, and how so many people, no matter how long they were at the show, are just with their families and loving their lives and not letting the years take away any of that experience for them.”
Yang called SNL “this growing, living thing where new people come in and you do have to sort of make way for them and to grow and to keep elevating themselves,” then adding, “That inevitably requires me to sort of hang it up at some point — but I don’t know what the vision is yet.”
According to some SNL fans, either Yang has figured out his vision since April, or it was already blurry from all the goodbye tears.
