Last time Justin Bieber wanted to launder his public image, he signed up to be the guest of honor on Comedy Central Roast. Months before the rollout of his massive 2015 album, Purpose, he used the platform to laugh gamely at jokes about his various scandals and reputation for petulance to demonstrate a newfound sense of self-awareness, contrition, and maturity. A decade later, Bieber has once again turned to comedy to deflect from a series of erratic social-media posts and publicized outbursts that have left fans concerned. But where he previously turned to an entire dais of mainstream comedians to pull off this PR spin, on his July 11 album, Swag, Bieber entrusted the task to just one person: Druski. Bieber is the latest in a long line of A-listers and brands who have enlisted the comedian and social-media juggernaut to help them appear in on the bit.
Druski’s rise began in October 2017, when he posted his first comedy sketch to Instagram. After a few years of cultivating a modest following filming videos in his hometown of Atlanta, his viewership rose during the pandemic thanks to a newly captive audience discovering his no-frills, character-driven output. In his videos, Druski plays archetypes recognizable in the Black community, like code-switching frat bros, sweaty used-car salesmen, and drug dealers who lack social etiquette with a commitment to realism the New York Times calls “anthropological.” What his sketches lack in traditional jokes they make up for in attention to detail. There is an unmistakable impatience in the voice of Druski’s TSA agent as he barks instructions at airportgoers to “put your shoes in another bin,” self-importance to his “New Age barber” who tells a walk-in client to download his app and book an appointment, and physicality to the way his “white boy that’s accepted by the hood” dances and raps along to music. According to a 2020 GQ profile, Druski grew up aspiring to be “the funniest kid in class,” and that desire to please comes through in his comedy and interviews. He’s broadly affable if the tiniest bit bland. Even in sharper-fanged sketches like the “white boy” one, Druski frames it like he’s laughing with his targets rather than at them. (In some cases, like in a series of videos in which he interacts with the public in character as a stereotypical football- and America-obsessed southerner, he quite literally laughs with them.)
Increased online traction led to the attention of celebrities like Lil Yachty, Drake, Diddy (pre-scandal), Odell Beckham Jr., and more, all of whom tapped Druski for opportunities that further raised his profile. Some of these high-profile collaborations pre-dated Druski’s rise or were born out of genuine camaraderie: Jack Harlow and Druski are real-life friends who went on tour together before either achieved genuine stardom, and Beckham Jr. took such a shine to Druski that he invited him to live in his house during the pandemic. But others were more transactional in nature. In casting Druski in the “Laugh Now Cry Later” music video, for example, Drake got to harness Druski’s acting chops to inject the video with a dose of humor and demonstrate that he has his finger on the pulse of the internet, which has long been part of his personal brand. There’s value in getting a content creator’s millions of followers, who watched him blow up online, to point at their screens in recognition. The comedian’s presence, as in the two other music videos he starred in that year — Lil Yachty’s “Oprah’s Bank Account” and Harlow’s “Tyler Herro” — lent a certain cultural cachet.
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It didn’t take long for brands to come calling. Druski’s proverbial bag has grown considerably since 2020 as he has seized opportunities to promote corporate giants including Google, Bud Light, KFC, Adidas, Amazon, American Express, and Pepsi. Even when the humor in these promotional spots is thin or Druski’s talents are underutilized, he brings his trademark chameleonic commitment to his role of corporate pitchman without revealing the artifice. He also brings instant goodwill with his young, largely Black audience. “He’s really good at what he does, and he understood the role and influence that he could play as the centerpiece,” Google executive Daryl Butler told the New York Times of Druski’s work on the company’s Pixel campaign. “He understood our mission.” He’s also constantly popping up on high-profile platforms in the sports world. He played in the 2025 NBA celebrity all-star game, he’s a courtside celebrity in the video game NBA 2K24, and last night, he presented and appeared in a sketch at the ESPYs.
In the rare instances when Druski has found himself on the wrong side of public approval, it tends to be because he’s strayed from his winning, crowd-pleasing formula. In 2022, the comedian posted a sketch online in which he plays a creep encouraging women to drink to excess so he can have sex with them. Some celebrated the sketch for skewering this brand of toxic behavior; others criticized it for its cavalier tone toward sexual assault. Druski deleted the sketch from the internet. His longer unscripted videos in which he plays the CEO of the half-satirical, half-authentic record company Coulda Been Records and travels around the country auditioning musician hopefuls, while extremely popular, have likewise invited backlash for creating in-groups and out-groups. “I don’t like making poor people and people on the autism spectrum audition for a fake record company so you can just make fun of them publicly,” said comedian Jay Jurden in a March Instagram video; the post has nearly 39,000 likes. Druski also found himself the unexpected target of controversy earlier this year when he was named, alongside Beckham Jr., in one of the 100-plus sexual-assault lawsuits filed against Diddy. He was alleged to have participated in a 2018 assault and has denied the allegations, stating that he wasn’t a “public figure” in 2018: “I was broke living with my mom without any connections to the entertainment industry at the time of this allegation, so the inclusion of my name is truly outlandish,” he wrote on social media.
This is not the version of Druski that Bieber enlisted when he brought the comedian in to record the trio of conversational interludes featured on Swag. Bieber sought the shapeshifting blank slate and brand ambassador. Assuming the role of his confidant and adviser, Druski hypes up the “soul” of Bieber’s music, gently ribs the pop star about a recent viral gaffe so he can laugh at the absurdity, unambiguously dismisses all of Bieber’s mercurial social-media posts as deliberate “trolling,” and blankets all of this in tepid non sequiturs about Black & Mild cigars to make it digestible. It’s a humdrum task for the comedian. He’s spent years convincing audiences of the accuracy of his sketch-comedy characters and his love for Jack Harlow’s KFC meal. Why can’t he convince them that Bieber is stable?
