Emmy Awards are great, but each years dozens of people and productions win them. Being turned into a 600-pound pumpkin, however, is a much more selective honor—and one that Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang can now count among his personal achievements.
Last week, Dublin, Ohio-based pumpkin artist Jeanette Paras unveiled her 2024 official Halloween creation: Yang dressed as baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng.
The inspiration came from the first episode of SNL’s monumental 50th season, when Yang stopped by the “Weekend Update” desk—as Moo Deng—to complain about becoming the world’s “parasocial bestie.” For many viewers, it was a funny bit. For Paras, a major SNL fan, it was a light bulb moment.
“Oh my gosh, Bowen YangKin (I also pumpkinize the names) as Moo DengKin killed it on ‘Weekend Update,’” Paras tells LateNighter. “Comedic genius.”
It’s also a pretty ingenious idea for a pumpkin sculpture, as Yang himself acknowledged.
“About an hour after we posted our ‘reveal’ post [last] Monday, Bowen Yang reposted—yes, reposted—our post,” Paras shared. “And then, about an hour later, went to our page and commented ‘This is incredible.’ That is the greatest compliment I could get and, wow, I got it! Did you hear me screaming? I totally lost it.”
Paras, the founder of Paras Pumpkins, has been combining her love of pop culture with her penchant for using giant gourds as her artistic canvas for nearly four decades. Since 1988, she has “pumpkinized” (her word) nearly 100 celebrities. But choosing which person to memorialize is a lot like choosing TIME’s Person of the Year: it’s more about capturing the zeitgeist than necessarily celebrating the individual. (Hence, Kim Jong Un becoming PumpKim Jong Un on more than one occasion over the years.)
“I ‘pumpkinize’ whoever is getting a lot of media buzz at the time, which is the end of September and early October,” says Paras. I know I found ‘the one’ when I start scream-laughing.”
While Yang is the first SNL actor who has received Paras’ pumpkin treatment (not counting former SNLer Jason Sudeikis, who was Ted Lassokin in 2021), he’s not the first late night star she has chosen to honor.
In 1993, Paras picked “Late Night Star Wars” as her theme and created a trio of pumpkins: Arsenio Hall, David Letterman, and Jay Leno. Leno made the cut again in 2009, partnered with Kanye West, after Ye’s much-publicized interview on the debut episode of The Jay Leno Show, where he apologized for interrupting Taylor Swift’s MTV Music Video Awards speech. (Swift herself was pumpkinized in 2023.)
More recently, in 2002, James Corden and Kim Kardashian were turned into James CordKin and Kim KardashiKin by Paras. That duo came about “after they did a hilarious skit called ‘The Targashians’ on The Late Late Show with James Corden,” she says. “Between the priceless combined satire of The Targaryens from House of the Dragon and the drama from The Kardashians, well I could not help myself.”
Corden seemed pretty tickled by the pumpkin tribute, too. “Corden did about two minutes of jokes about my display and showed my photos in his monologue,” says Paras. “He even included a past pumpkin, Naughty Prince Harry. I totally deserved what he said about that,” she added with a laugh.
Though Jimmy Fallon has yet to be pumpkinized by Paras, he has featured her work in his monologue in both 2018 (when Pump YEkin was the chosen subject) and again last year to talk about Taylor SwiftKin. “Yes, again I screamed,” she says.
While Paras’ goal with her pumpkin creations is to make both herself and others laugh, there’s a more serious side to her business. In addition to being Halloween month, October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “As a two-time breast cancer ‘thriv-r,’ my hope is to bring attention to the importance of early detection of breast cancer and raise funds for research through the attention amassed by my Paras Pumpkins,” says Paras, noting that “one out of eight women will face breast cancer—and that is a lot of women.”
She is using awareness of her pumpkin creations to help raise money for The Stefanie Spielman Fund for Breast Cancer Research at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center (you can learn more about donating here).
You can follow Paras on Instagram to learn more about her pumpkin creations, and watch what goes into creating one of those ginormous works of art.
