Rule of Culture No. 26: Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers aren’t going to tell the same joke twice, even for the Las Culturistas Culture Awards.
The podcast hosts return for their fifth annual comedy special on Wednesday night, both spoofing and celebrating the best in pop culture from over the last year. Taped last month at the United Theater on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, this will also mark the pair’s second televised iteration of the LCCAs.
“The cool thing about our show is we get to see the year unfold and we get to see what’s hitting in pop culture, so that kind of says a little bit to us about what kind of direction we should be moving in,” Rogers told TheWrap. “It’s an excuse to interact with what people are interacting with, but we have to kind of wait and see; you can’t think too much about it.”
“There’s a million things to riff on with these awards shows, so you’re never running out of terrain — and also, there’s so many different types. Our design team does an amazing job of making our show malleable so that they can kind of satirize anything that any awards show is doing: be it the VMAs, the Oscars, even something like the SAG Awards,” he continued. “Everything’s on the table going forward. If it happens in an awards show, we can find a way to satirize it. But then once we do that joke as best as we can, it would be diminishing returns to do it again.”
“The only real rollover from last year is Lisa Rinna doing Outfit of the Year, but we really did have an early-on discussion about, do we do another take on the In Memoriam like we did last year? How should we work in these musical numbers, these Record of the Year nominees structurally into the show?” Yang added. “That was a really liberating moment, when Matt showed up to the room one day and was like, ‘Guys, I think we shouldn’t stress too much about how to quote-unquote ‘Top’ last year with the In Memoriam segment.’ Let’s just wipe it clean, build this from scratch again, because that’s what worked.”
Plus, despite airing on Bravo and Peacock, Bowen and Yang praised NBCUniversal for not forcing any symphony on them or their unique categories.
“It has been my No. 1 streamer for three years in a row now. It’s just surreal to see your idea on that splash page, on that landing page, but it just lives alongside them so seamlessly,” Yang shared. “Sure, there’s a lot of integration, if you want to call it that, but it is the culture that we consume.”
“One misconception people might have is that we have to include a lot of NBCUniversal or Peacock or Bravo stuff. We’re never asked to do anything, it’s just that we enjoy a lot of that content. I don’t think that anyone is surprised when they watch the show if they listen to our podcast that these things are there,” Rogers further noted. “They’re really great about allowing us to bring in some other IP. It was important to us to be able to have free reign on really anything, because we’re satirizing awards shows and the entertainment industry and the culture, not just this brand.”
See what defines culture when the 2026 Las Culturistas Culture Awards air Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo and Peacock.
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