Everywhere you turn, there’s Druski.
He’s in your social media feeds, playing risqué viral characters. He’s there alongside the Backstreet Boys in a T-Mobile Super Bowl commercial. He’s on YouTube, producing and inhabiting fun house mirror versions of reality television staples. He’s featured on hit albums and tours, all over NBA All-Star Weekend, in A-list rap videos and more.
Born Drew Desbordes, Druski, 31, has a career firmly emblematic of the current media moment, in which there are countless channels to find attention, allowing a performer to be multiple kinds, and levels, of famous all at once.
“I just be wanting to achieve so much that it’s hard to stop,” Druski said on Popcast, The New York Times culture chat show. But that ubiquity, which has made him one of the most recognizable faces in comedy, is also tiring: “After this year, man, I don’t even know if I’ll be at a Super Bowl or an All-Star Game. They had us everywhere.”
Across mediums and milieus, Druski, who hails from Atlanta, moves with a kind of theatrical bravado borrowed from hip-hop, but still presents as wise for his age. His YouTube shows are affectionately lawless — Druski plays a mercurial mogul of nothing in “Coulda Been Records,” an “American Idol”-like audition series for a nonexistent record label, and “Coulda Been Love” is a throwback to the startling romantic mayhem of “Flavor of Love” via “The Bachelor” and “Bad Girls Club.”
He’s perhaps best known for his galaxy of affable and detailed original characters — a greedy pastor, a white man raised in a Black neighborhood, a Black man in a white fraternity, an Asian nail tech — who populate his viral social media skits and reveal an instinctual talent for social anthropology.
“I read body language — I’m very good at focusing on people,” Druski said. “I grew up in a suburb around Mexican, Black, Indian, white, Hispanic, anything you could think of. And I have friends of all these races. So I always was a very visual learner, trying to figure out, oh, why is this person like this? Why is that person like that?”
That broad understanding of the world has made Druski an easeful collaborator with the likes of Justin Bieber (who enlisted him for the interludes on the 2025 album “Swag”) and Timothée Chalamet (who had a memorable “Coulda Been Records” appearance).
The following edited excerpts from his Popcast interview, which can be watched or listened to in full below, chart the most crucial nodes in Druski’s ever-growing universe.
Justin Bieber
On the singer’s Grammy-nominated album “Swag,” Druski recurs as a conversational sparring partner, poking at the star’s image.
“I’ve known him for a couple years and he always would hit me up like, ‘Bro, I love your [expletive].’ We would just talk on FaceTime. I knew we would do something, so I never really tried to force anything on him. Eventually he called me. He was like, ‘Yo, are you still out here in L.A.?’ and I was like, ‘Damn, I’m getting right to the airport.’ He was just like, ‘If you could cancel that flight and come to the studio right now … I want you on this album and we’re turning it in tomorrow.’ I had to do that. Bro, I’ve loved Justin Bieber forever. So we turned around immediately, we didn’t even think twice. We canceled everything and went straight to the studio.
“I knew everybody was gonna be smoking weed — I hate being around people if they’re doing something, I wanna do it, too, but I don’t smoke weed or do drugs. So I was like, hey, give me a Black & Mild. I want to be smoking, I want to look cool with y’all. They were laughing at that.
“Me and him talked about how he wanted to get off some of the stuff he had been going through in the media, him yelling at the paparazzi and all that. He wanted to have interludes that were talking about that stuff without it being serious. I was like, just let me do like a therapy session. I’m going to smoke this Black & Mild and we’re just going to talk.”
His Black Comedy Titans
Despite starting on social media, Druski is a committedly old-fashioned comedian, with a raft of impressions and flirtations with political incorrectness.
“I was constantly watching a bunch of the O.G.s, like Bernie Mac and Kevin Hart. It was a weird time when I first started, because a lot of dudes were trying to go viral for wild [expletive] — the Boonk Gang era, like you run in a store, throw [expletive] on the ground. I couldn’t believe what was going on. I was like, ‘Damn, is this comedy? If this is how you blow up on the internet, I don’t know if I could do this.’
“I just continued to watch a lot of Steve Harvey or Eddie Murphy or Martin Lawrence, see the characters they’ve done. I was trying to bring that back into reality, because I knew we were in a crazy place on social media. My dad watched a lot of ‘Chappelle’s Show.’ My mom would tell me to go upstairs, but I would sit on the steps and try to listen to what Dave Chappelle was saying and then go to school and repeat it.”
2000s Reality Television
Druski uses the templates of unscripted programming — documenting real people who dream of money or fame — and improvises on top of them to create a particularly modern blend of real and unreal.
“I wanted to bring in the female fan base side of things, and what the majority of all these girls are watching right now, like ‘Love Island.’ ‘Coulda Been Love’ is a piece of everything I grew up watching in one show. Definitely derived from ‘Flavor of Love’ with Flavor Flav. A little bit of ‘Bad Girls Club’ — well, a lot of ‘Bad Girls Club.’ A little of the ‘Jersey Shore’ vibe. I would love the episodes where it was chaos going on, but just the right amount of entertainment. I wanted to do something like that in my world.”
Atlanta
Raised in Gwinnett County, on Atlanta’s north side, Druski emerged during the late 2010s boom, when hip-hop welcomed a new crop of artists and entertainers from the area.
“Atlanta has been a big part of my success. Everybody’s supporting each other — the athletes, the rappers, the singers, the O.G.s, even the other comedians who also are doing skits or stand-up or whatever. I was in college and I remember being so inspired by seeing what the Migos did because I never saw anybody from where I was from in Atlanta. So, seeing the Migos go to a new level and seeing them linked up with Drake, I was like, wow. I’d seen N.B.A. players like Lou [Williams] blow up, of course. But I had never seen it on the scale that the Migos had done. I remember just being like, ‘Damn, I wanna be a Migo.’ I think that had a lot to do with me wanting to pursue my own dreams. It’s something about seeing it from somebody where you’re from. You almost think it’s unachievable when you see somebody from a far distance.”
Corporate America
Druski has also become a reliable corporate pitchman for the likes of Dunkin’ and Google, a surprising turn that displays the power of his demographic reach and versatility, given some of his raunchier work online.
“People will see some chaotic thing, something crazy on the internet and they’ll be like, ‘I just saw you on a T-Mobile commercial on TV! How the hell … ?’ I feel like I walk a line in comedy that appeals to all masses of the world, so it works, you know?
“Somebody called me a jester. And I was like ‘Damn, am I a jester?’ Jesters get to make fun of whatever, and they get away with everything.”
“You can walk that line where it’s like four or five different fan bases. When we’re riding in the Delta plane, it’s a lady who’s like 60 or 70 years old. She’s like, ‘Druski, I love the stuff you do — you’re so silly!’ I’m like, ‘Do you know the [expletive] I be doing? Are you sure that you know what the [expletive] I be doing?’
“I gotta give credit to Eddie Murphy. Eddie was able to appeal to the kids — ‘Dr. Dolittle,’ ‘Shrek’ with Donkey — and then he’s doing some of the craziest, raunchy stuff. Whiteface, all that. Same with Kevin Hart, seeing Kevin be in every single market — and I mean every single market. You’ll see him on all the commercials, and then you’ll see him do the me, Kai [Cenat] and Kev stream where we’re wilding out. Those two guys are the main ones that opened that door.”
Timothée Chalamet
Druski’s audition series has become a showcase not just for real aspirants, but also for guest judges like Chalamet, whose impromptu rendition of the gospel classic “Something About the Name Jesus” became an internet talking point.
“The whole thing with me and Timmy was unscripted. I saw some pictures of him dressed as Soulja Boy back in the day. So I knew. I just knew from doing my research. Kirk Franklin was a whole new level — that’s like back with my family, that’s church stuff. So when he did that, I was like, ‘Yo, what you know about that, boy?’
“I think it’s an incredible moment. We’ve talked since then multiple times about possibly doing something together, like a ‘Bad Boys’-type film or something like a ‘Rush Hour.’ It’s just an idea right now, he’s into it. We’ll see what happens. I think a lot of people really loved to see the chemistry that we shared on camera.”
Hollywood?
Druski has not yet had a starring turn on the big screen, but said he is meeting with studios and directors to find a vehicle that suits his outsized personality and comedic gifts.
“I’ve had opportunities to appear in certain movies, but I’m very particular about putting the right step forward. We want the first one to be big, like an Adam Sandler, ‘Happy Madison’-type breakout. So we’ve tried to make the smart decision of waiting. That’s why we’re having meetings with Josh Safdie or a lot of these other execs.
“I always hated seeing my favorite comedians go serious. I’m not trying to be the one crying and all that. The only thing I would say I loved from a comedian standpoint is the way Jamie Foxx has done his career with doing like a biopic or something like that, seeing the seriousness of that, or ‘Django.’ Eddie Murphy in ‘Dreamgirls’ — that was a really good one, as well.”
His Trademark Birkenstocks
Perhaps most impressively, Druski has done it all in sandals.
“I’ve got probably past 100 pairs, man. I just got gifted some Chrome Hearts Birkenstocks. That was a dope gift. Over the course, I’ve thrown some away. You can smell when it’s time to throw out that Birkenstock.”
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Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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