This story is part of the 2026 TIME100 Next. Read Mark Wahlberg’s tribute to Druski here.
On a cloudy August Sunday, Drew Desbordes—best known as Druski—rolls his ebike into the hallway of his temporary Manhattan apartment. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his eyebrows and zips the collar all the way up to his nose, obscuring all but his eyes. The content creator and comedian has been living in New York for the summer, shooting his biggest movie role to date, and riding his bike through the city is his favorite way to decompress. But he always hides his face.
“I really just do it for safety,” he says. Somewhere on the ride to Brooklyn, he pulls off the hood, and two men dash across the street to catch him at a traffic light, filming as they flag him down for a selfie.
Really, this kind of attention is what Druski, 32, has always wanted. There’s a narrative we sometimes apply to entertainers, that this person or that person became famous not by being “discovered” or uplifted by Hollywood power brokers or institutions, but instead by the sheer force of their own will. They decide at a certain point, usually early in life, that they need to be known to the world. And then because they are charismatic or skilled or driven or delusionally confident enough (or some combination of the above), they actually make it happen. Druski is one of those people.
—Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIMENine years ago, he was posting short clips on social media of himself joking around—he even shared a video of his car being repossessed, openly marking a financial and existential low point in the wake of dropping out of college. His handful of followers encouraged him to keep going, and he grew more ambitious with his videos, developing a style of comedy that has both endeared his audience to his gregarious personality and showcased his ability to act. In short skits, Druski inhabits hyperspecific characters and skewers their behavior: a frat guy with no self-awareness, an over-the-top megachurch pastor, a racist Nascar fan. The rapper Drake took notice early on and cast Druski in a music video alongside Kevin Durant, Odell Beckham Jr., and Marshawn Lynch. Marketers began to realize that Druski could sell to a valuable audience, offering him deals to promote their products.
Now, he’s one of social media’s most bankable stars, with more than 30 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and brand partnerships with multiple major corporations. He’s starred in two Super Bowl commercials (for Dunkin’ in 2025 and T-Mobile this year), and worked with a who’s who of culture: Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Ben Affleck, Tom Brady, Jamie Foxx, Chris Rock, Timothée Chalamet, Snoop Dogg, Zoe Saldaña, and now—in the baseball romcom The Catch, out next year—Chris Pine and Emma Stone. With live comedy tours, a hosting gig at this year’s BET Awards, and TV deals under his belt, Druski is taking major steps toward his goal of comedy superstardom.
He shows zero shyness when it comes to articulating his vision: “You're looking at the modern-day Eddie Murphy or the modern-day Kevin Hart.”
Druski grew up in Gwinnett County, outside of Atlanta, in a family that valued funny. His late grandfather was a prankster. His mom is good for a laugh, too. Sometimes, she would pull out the camcorder and he’d go to town performing, cracking jokes, rapping, hamming it up. (His dad was an airline pilot and often tough on the family—in a recent interview on the Diary of CEO podcast, Druski told stories about physical violence in their home, saying he tended to try to be the comedic relief in the room. He also said he and his father have a good relationship today.) His mother also introduced him to comedians like Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Murphy—giants whose example Druski has looked to as he’s built his own career. He has a quote from Ferrell’s movie Talladega Nights tattooed on his leg.
As a kid, he’d watch Entertainment Tonight and TMZ, studying how paparazzi would follow stars around in the streets. While his mom urged him to turn it off, he was glued to the screen. He likes to describe how people in Gwinnett referred to him as a “local celebrity.” Parents of his classmates loved him. They would always wave or stop to say hello when they ran into him in town, and he’d joke around with them, asking for cigarettes to see how they’d respond.
He says he got bad grades and was kicked off the football team because he was always messing around in class, and later lost jobs for the same reason. When he dropped out of Georgia Southern University—where he never quite found the fun and lively college experience he’d envisioned—Druski told his mom he was going to become a comedian. There was no backup plan. “Everything works out for the right reasons,” he says. “Everything comes to life.”
But getting there wasn’t easy. “There's nobody out there looking for the next comedian,” Druski says. “The new way of doing things is like: you got to just do it yourself.”
—Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIMEWith every skit Druski produces, he and his team, including a childhood friend he often writes with, are thinking about how to maximize. Maybe he’s introducing a new character—could that character be meaty and funny enough to ground a pitch for a TV series? How far can they stretch it? “Even when I began and I was doing early videos where they were just silly things and it had no bigger meaning or purpose to the comedy, I always would find some type of way to maximize it,” he says. “With anything I'm given, I want to make the most out of this situation that I have at hand.”
A prime example: Druski’s viral skit about a megachurch pastor. (It’s somewhat hilarious that Druski continues to refer to his videos as “skits,” given the production value.) In the short piece, he plays a money-hungry pastor dripping in designer clothing, suspended from the rafters during his sermon for no apparent reason and later counting the cash he’s squeezed out of his congregation with a greedy grin on his face. That character made an appearance during Druski’s hosting role at the BET Awards—he brought a gospel choir onstage and scolded them—and is at the center of an upcoming TV series, Collect & Praise, that he shot over the summer. Druski makes a point to reinvest most of the money he’s earning into creating ever-better content. Collect & Praise was originally planned for his YouTube channel—like his reality TV spoofs Coulda Been Records and Coulda Been Love—but has since been snapped up by Netflix.
“I'm such a fan of upgrading everything that I'm trying to achieve,” Druski says. “Why can't I take the money and try to recreate this in a bigger universe?”
Fresh from his ride across the bridge to Brooklyn, Druski dismounts and heads into the apartment of his frequent collaborator, David Janoff, who directed Collect & Praise. They’re taking advantage of Druski’s summer in New York, using all the downtime they can to edit the show. Druski kicks off his sneakers and shuffles into Janoff’s editing room, where they scrub through a scene where the pastor canoes out onto a lake in the middle of the night with a co-conspirator. “Because they're improvising, we're trying to make sure each scene is flowing to the next,” Janoff says.
Druski gets inspiration for his characters from real people he observes in the world. Disingenuous televangelists influenced this one. Some of his others, like the frat boy Kyle Rogger, come from more personal interactions. A few days before his editing session with Janoff, Druski posted a skit about a character he calls Ray Price, a football player who suffers a major concussion and begins acting out, attacking women, creating unhinged social posts, and leading police in a high-speed chase. Multiple professional athletes spoke out in response, calling the video insensitive to those impacted by CTE. “My type of comedy is to show sometimes how things are right in front of us, and we may not notice it, but it's literally right here,” Druski says. “Comedy comes from real-life things, and sometimes putting up that mirror, some people can get sensitive to the subject matter. But it's real things going on in the world.”
—Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIMEOne of his most talked-about videos, with more than 100 million views on Instagram alone, is titled “How Conservative Women in America Act.” In white makeup, with a blonde wig and icy blue contact lenses—a look widely believed to reference Erika Kirk—Druski sheds performative tears, struggles through a Pilates class, demands organic food for a tiny dog, and makes unabashedly racist remarks. (“Every morning I wake up to a new headline written about me. I have comedians dressing up in whiteface,” Kirk said in a video posted to social media in April without naming names, adding, “There is a serious epidemic of dehumanization plaguing this country.”) Druski would rather talk through the logistics that go into his makeup for a video like this than discuss its political implications. “I’m not no politician,” he says. “I’m just a funny guy.”
His goal is to keep people laughing, in as many ways as possible. A long-awaited film with Hart and streamer Kai Cenat, Livestream From Hell, drops on Prime Video at the end of September. Collect & Praise will come out before the end of the year. The Catch is coming in the spring.
“I always try to figure out: What's this next level I could create? What's the next thing I could do, and not just stay in one category? If I'm funny here, can I not be funny if I host an awards show? If I host my own tour, can I be funny there? Can I be funny on screen on TV?” Druski says. He doesn’t want to be boxed into a single medium.
In many ways, Druski is living exactly the life he saw for himself as he watched all that TV as a kid. “I had to find my purpose,” he says. “I’m definitely living in it now.”
Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIME; Styling by Drew Ferguson; Grooming by Hector Sanchez.
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