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Bowen Yang & Joel Kim Booster Are Tired of The Hollywood Reporter Mixing Them Up
"Isn't it your literal job to tell people in my industry apart???" Booster asked on Twitter.
Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang are two very, very different men.
Booster is a Korean-American stand-up comedian and actor known for his abs and for writing and starring in Fire Island. Yang is a Chinese-American comedian known for over-the-top characters in projects like Bros and Dicks: The Musical and for being one of the funniest people on Saturday Night Live. They have very different styles of comedy and extremely different aesthetics and appearances.
However, The Hollywood Reporter keeps on mixing them up.
Booster and Yang have gotten sick and tired of the racism, and have started to call it out now that the entertainment trade has mixed them up for a second time in recent years.
The trouble comes from an article on THR about The Morning Show star Juliana Margulies and her recent comments on a podcast where she criticized Black and queer people for supporting Palestine.
“These people who want us to call them they/them or whatever they want us to call them — which I have respectfully really made a point of doing, like, be whoever you want to be,” she said. “It’s those people that will be the first people beheaded and their heads played [like] a soccer ball. Terrorists who don’t want women to have their rights, don’t want LGBTQ people … this is who you’re supporting?”
She then said that she heard about a Black lesbian club at Columbia University that had disinvited Zionists from a film night. “And as someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you,” she said.
Both Yang and Booster have been critical of Margulies, with Booster tweeting, “I’ve never heard someone want to say a slur more than Julianna Margulies does in that little podcast she did.”
Unfortunately, when THR reported about the tweet, they said it was from “Saturday Night Live comedian Joel Kim Booster,” confusing him for Yang.
Y’all. Isn’t it your literal job to tell people in my industry apart??? Please use my preferred credit, Saturday Night Live Comedian’s Friend!! https://t.co/reUn1qbhNJ pic.twitter.com/eycValD22l
— Joel Kim Booster (@ihatejoelkim) December 1, 2023
Booster retweeted the article with a screenshot showing the error.
“Y’all. Isn’t it your literal job to tell people in my industry apart???” he wrote. “Please use my preferred credit, Saturday Night Live Comedian’s Friend!!”
And let us never forget… pic.twitter.com/WFeytvpClW
— Joel Kim Booster (@ihatejoelkim) December 1, 2023
Booster also reminded his fans of a tweet from THR in 2019 that showed a picture of Booster with the headline “Get to know #SNL’s newest cast member @bowenyang”
Yang mentioned the controversy on his podcast Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers, but was more serious about his feelings.
During the “I Don’t Think So Honey” segment toward the end of the podcast, Rogers started calling out Margulies and her racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments.
After Yang added his agreement, he also mentioned The Hollywood Reporter.
“Also I Don’t Think So Honey Hollywood Reporter for still confusing me and Joel Kim Booster in an article about this whole Juliana Margulies thing. An article that is reporting on racism.”
“How ironic is that? It made me so upset,” Rogers added. “It’s an article reporting on racism and then you do the racist bullshit of ‘Saturday Night Live comedian Joel Kim Booster.’”
“For the second time! For the second time! For the second time! What is going on,” Yang cried.
“This is your job, these trades, this is your f*cking job to get this shit right,” Rogers added.
Booster and Yang continue to be two of the funniest comedians working today, and continue to be two very different comedians and men.
An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote from Yang's podcast to Booster. Out has corrected this error and deeply regrets this mistake.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
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