On Oct. 10, noted Diddy party attendee and online content creator Druski—famous for often having his ass crack out—posted a casting call for the 40+ in East New York. After making videos with Timothée Chalamet and Mike Epps, Druski would now be joined by Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame.
Though Baron Cohen’s never explicitly identified as a Zionist, his leanings are, by now, obvious enough to be a source of online ire against Druski. A Toronto music blogger posted screenshots on Twitter showing that keywords like “Zionist” and “Free Palestine” had been blocked from the comments of Druski’s announcement post. The post was later removed, and a repost had comments and visible likes disabled. By the day of publication, the post had been archived or deleted.
I arrived early at Eastern Effects (302 Sheffield Ave.), a film stage off the Sutter L in East New York. One block resident, who went by Black, told me that a previous Druski audition took place here last year. Police onsite confirmed they had cordoned off the block specifically for the audition taping. Across the street was a pitifully small line.
One man on line, Myles, said he intended to go in and scream incoherently. When asked about the comment section controversy, he said he didn’t involve himself in politics.
It turned out everyone on line was reluctant to talk politics when asked about Druski’s comment drama. One hopeful, Mark, agreed when I offered that everyone is a badass online. Franchise, his friend with a soul-patch dread and pencil mustache, declined to respond. They seemed torn between bored and annoyed with me (a common problem on my line interviews).
Mark and Franchise told me that everyone here was busy auditioning to be an unc. Inside, they said they would be given a script to improvise.
One of the chucklefucks on line called me Jeffrey Dahmer from across the street while I took photos. He flashed me the bird (either arthritis kept his middle finger from staying up, or his heart just wasn’t in it). To be expected: this was the chance for the screwball clout chasers of New York to debase themselves for a chance at going viral.
After that, I can only imagine that Druski would use this as an opportunity to cackle and stick his tongue out while Baron Cohen says something disparaging about Arabs, because why not? In Druski’s content, everything and everyone is meant to be laughed at, and no line is crossed because, for him, there is no line. Despite his habit of punching down, Druski retains institutional approval: he hosted the 26th BET Awards this year, and he is set to appear on SNL this year.
Druski’s videos ridicule gay men and the disabled. In one, Druski and Mike Epps describe a man’s diminutive arm as a “chicken wing.” The chance for fame, gratified by the linked post, is how Druski launders exploitation as participation.
Other common targets of parody include prisoners, Hoteps, and guys without day jobs hanging around on Instagram Live. But Druski isn’t focused on only throwing lowbrow caricatures of black culture under the bus.
In another video, he plays a mentally disabled neurodivergent man employed as a tax preparer. Everyone is an acceptable target for Druski. These videos receive at minimum a quarter-million likes and often exceed 2 million. Druski may be cruel, but it’s what we apparently want.
A common refrain on Twitter is that Druski parodies everyone except Jewish people. While that’s true, I’d challenge anyone to come up with a 68-second video critiquing Jewish culture that doesn’t, at best, come across as gauche and offensive. Druski, however, already criticizes the larger white culture of which Jewish culture is a part: frat culture, NASCAR, sports executives painting athletes as criminals, white appropriation of black culture (something Baron Cohen is notable for).
Recently, Druski played a poor white woman yelling at another poor white woman, making light of the immiseration of middle America. The breakdown of family, drug abuse, poverty: a trailer park tackiness that he positions himself as above. It is a humorless skit: a punchline about steaming fajitas is repeated three times. The unfunny lean on being mean.
Druski grew up in my home county in Georgia. A year older than me, he was there when Gwinnett County was (and still is) no pinnacle of culture: 20 miles south of chicken CAFOs, an hourlong crawl on I-85 to Midtown Atlanta. He grew up in a town with trailer parks. He is from the same America.
In the past, he has moved beyond an apolitical critique—reflected in the disengagement of the crowd I interacted with—into the implicitly political. In another video, he smacks the ass of a Miss Rachel stand-in. That was released during the real Miss Rachel’s public advocacy for children in Gaza. He launders his parody of her through a typical two-faced Druski character who smiles and dances at one moment before cutting to say “Fuck them kids” and snort blow. It was a year in which Miss Rachel was pilloried—with Zionist groups calling for the DOJ to investigate her—for having the gall to say that children shouldn’t be killed.
Like his other parodies, Druski was riding the hype, just as he did with his Erika Kirk parody. He is an opportunist and one of the most cynical operators working in media today. His output gives the impression he believes in nothing. His fans, and aspirants, appear lockstep in presenting themselves as the same.
This isn’t to say this form of media can’t address contemporary human conditions. In one video, Jason Wonodi, who posts on Instagram as @jayw0_, moves a shallow critique of streaming into something that hints at the loneliness and gullibility endemic in society. A Twitch streamer and YouTuber who goes by @zeefromnewyawk amplifies the small indignities of gentrification through an eye for small details (a super complaining about the smell of beef patties as he eats from a tub of Trader Joe’s Greek yogurt, presumably a bribe from newer white tenants). These videos use audio effects and face edits endemic to Instagram. The cheap effects become part and amplifier of universal narratives that don’t present as victims of their own failings, but as the targets of greater forces.
Druski’s videos, meanwhile, have higher production values and are often sparse in humor. He has reinvented Saturday Night Live’s digital shorts from first principles. Druski is our Hell World Kenan Thompson, and everyone keeps tuning in.
P.S. East New York is another staging ground, past the storage of the dead at The Evergreens Cemetery (16-29 Bushwick Ave.), and storage for the movements of the living at the MTA’s East New York Yard (56 Conway St.). Closer to streets like Georgia, Alabama, New Jersey and Vermont: named for the states future residents will come from. There, the words “gritty” and “authentic” bounced in my head like paint can mixing balls. I looked into third-floor factory windows and imagined myself lofting in there. I’m an animal, too: in my head, I mispronounced the neighborhood as “Estates New York,” and kind of liked it for a second there. In 10 years, this might be Bushwick again.
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