Watch: Bowen Yang Looks Back on 'Detrimental' Time Spent Suffering Through 'Conversion Therapy'

"SNL" cast member Bowen Yang looked back on having suffered through a "very painful" time undergoing conversion therapy and "a lot of healing" he needed in the aftermath, People Magazine reported.

The 34-year-old comic explained during an appearance on "Sunday TODAY" why, as a teen, he "played along" with his parents' demand that he undergo the pseudoscientific practice, which promises to "cure" queer people and "convert" them into cisgender heterosexuals.

But when Yang "humored them [his parents] and myself into seeing what it was" about, he found out the hard way what reputable mental health professionals warn: The discredited "therapy" is not just ineffectual, it causes harm to vulnerable people, often youthful, who seek to "fix" something about themselves that is not actually broken.

Yang recounted that his reasoning for subjecting himself to "conversion therapy," aside from "humoring" his parents, was the "ultimatum" his parents handed down: "If you go to [conversion] therapy, then you can go to school at NYU where your sister is," he recalled them telling him.

"And so I kind of played along and I kind of just humored them and myself into seeing what it was, not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental. And there was a lot of healing that happened after that," Yang went on to say.

The funnyman didn't express blame or bitterness toward his parents, telling host Willie Geist that what he heard from his parents was, "Where we come from, this doesn't happen."

"That was sort of their concept of it," Yang said. "And so I give them a lot of grace for that, because they just have no context for it."

Yang "also shared that he 'really didn't get to work through' his identity before his parents found out he was gay," People noted. "I think I probably wasn't brave enough back then to express that, or to package it in a way that they could understand."

Yang has spoken before about his experience with the discredited practice. Earlier this month, in conversation with Lady Gaga on the podcast he hosts with Matt Rogers, Yang revealed to Mother Monster that her anthem "Born This Way" was a therapeutic tonic, telling her, "you've saved my life" with her music, which, he said, he has listened to during "very dark times."

"I think I had come out of the closet again when 'Born This Way' came out," Yang told the "Bad Romance" singer, "because I went to conversion therapy," which "obviously did not work out," he added.

What did work out, however, was his eventual attendance at NYU.

"Those poor people did not realize it's one of the gayest schools in the country," Yang said of his parents, laughing along with Geist, People relayed. But even at such an early age, Yang felt the pull of the big city. "I just knew I had to live there," he said.

Indeed, he described his first trip to NYC as an occasion when, though tickets to "Wicked" proved impossible to get, "all I wanted to do was just push my face up against the glass of the Gershwin, just to feel a tactility, a contact, with this – this musical that I loved."

Eventually, of course, Yang would star in the two-part movie version of the Broadway musical. But that wasn't the only moment that proved to resonate with his career to come.

"We went down the street to 30 Rock to take the studio tour with the page," Yang said. "We sat in the bleachers at SNL" – a foreshadowing he called "wild."

Watch Yang's remarks in the clip below.