Druski's Ginuwine

On why a bit without a joke still finds laughs.

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Saheim Patrick is a performer and writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in Teen Vogue and the Hampton Institute, and has been recognized nationally by organizations such as YoungArts, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. When he grows up, he’d like to be the angriest Black man in America.

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If the state of Black Comedy can be analyzed at all today—where social media has effectively dismantled the concept of a mainstream into millions of little social accounts, YouTube Channels, and podcasts—failing to mention Druski would be, to understate it, a gross omission.

Where the Internet’s overpopulation has, for the vast majority, reduced the chances of ever having a truly “broad” or “mass” appeal, he’s emerged as one of today’s few genuinely popular comedic voices. For this reason, he’s one of the most interesting comedians working today, if only for the fact that what he does has such a vast influence on everyone else in the industry.

SNL’s Michael Che, in an interview with Vanity Fair, on how he feels comedy has changed.

The viral sensation emerged from a brand of online comedy that began to garner popularity around 2017—vertically shot, loosely scripted, anthropological observations of urban Black life (his most notable colleague in this genre would probably be Desi Banks, who goes by @iamdesibanks on Instagram).

Without making remarks on the genre as a whole, Druski’s videos in particular are, and have always been, well-made, silly, and astute. They have also always been loose. As opposed to structured scenes or, say, traditional jokes, the comedian relies on what comedy journalist Jesse David Fox dubs, in his 2023 treatise, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work, “play theory”—a general attitude, or mood, that the comedian creates. Similar to the one that one might be in when joking around with friends, or “laughing at a funny face a relative makes when we’re a child.” Jokes, Fox says, are simply means by which comedians play.

It’s why Druski’s skits work on a broad level. They tap into this primal silliness and sense of play central not only to the art of comedy, but humanity.

With that being said, the skits greatest strengths—and what I believe holds them together, gives them real staying power—is their astuteness. Often times, if nothing in the actual video makes you laugh, the fact that he’s even tackling the subject will.

They not only fulfill the basic principles of comedy, as outlined by Joan Rivers, to, “…make everybody laugh at everything, and deal with things, you idiot,” but also in giving name, and life, to what those things even are, for a people who have so many things that they deal with, yet so little names for them.

As playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins puts it in his struggle with defining what it means to be “Black”, or what the word “race” even means:

I would say the only struggle is that I don’t know what people are talking about [when they say “race”] I think the idea of race… that word is such a smoke screen. It’s supposed to hold so many experiences, and then the minute you start talking about race, someone from another community wants to pipe up and say you’re doing it wrong, because you’re not talking about them.

Thus, Druski’s skits make way for defining what a “Black Comedy” might be.

The best way to describe what I mean is to point towards Druski’s latest release—a remake of a 2001 performance of “Pony” by the R&B artist, Ginuwine, on the BET music video show, 106 & Park. It’s one of the blackest sentences I’ve ever written, and that’s exactly why the skit works.

I say “remake”, as opposed to “parody”, because the video parodies nothing. The only big difference between the original video, which is already absurd and exaggerated on its own, and Druski’s, is the fact that Ginuwine is instead played by the comedian. Outside of that, though, the video, essentially, has no joke. In spite of that, it’s currently at roughly 687,000 likes on TikTok, 8,000 on YouTube, and God knows how many on Instagram, where Druski averages his most views.

So, why are people laughing so fervently? What is the sense of play being engineered by, if not jokes?

The answer is, on two levels, cultural capital.

On one level, which I feel is less relevant, but still undoubtedly true, is that Druski is, like I said, a genuinely popular comedic voice. He’s created enough content, been funny in front of enough people, that he’s reached the point of fame that pervades comedians like Chris Rock, and gives credence to myths like the one that’s often cited on the subject of why Eddie Murphy quit stand-up. “When I saw Rock, he was famous enough that he could get the audience to laugh just because of his vocal inflection,” writes Jesse David Fox, for example.

It’s very likely that Druski is at this point, where he can do or say almost anything, and a sizeable portion of his audience would laugh (this is evident, to me, from the popularity of his Coulda Been House, of which my criticisms would require their own, separate essay). But, what I think really gives this video its gas, is the cultural capital of the referenced video, itself.

For example, what is the White equivalent of this “parody”? What moment in their storied lives is so culturally rich that its mere imitation could produce millions of views, likes, and catharsis? Of not just nods at its novelty, but true laughter?

Druski’s Ginuwine is the rawest example in his work of what fuels his comedy, and, more generally, what it is that fuels Black Comedy—if that’s even a thing, of course.

That is, a sense of play designed entirely around and off of the cultural richness that lies at the heart of Black Culture. It’s why The World’s First Racial Draft, or Black Jepoardy, works, for example. Jenkins, in his wrestling, expands his argument.

I’ll feel like, are we talking about the psychological legacies of slavery? Because when you put things that way, you’re not talking about people. You’re talking about systems. You’re talking about participating in a system, and you can’t buy into that conversation based on whether or not you’re brown or Black or whatever.

So, perhaps, when we talk about Black Comedy, we’re not talking about race at all. Maybe, what we’re actually talking about is culture. But, of course, the question then stands, what’s that?

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