Andrew Dismukes, the SNL comedian who writes the jokes and plays the punchline

Andrew Dismukes

Photo: Vedecci / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 21, 1995 Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Comedian, actor and screenwriter
Known for	Super Troopers 3
Awards	Florida Film Festival Special Jury (shared)

The bridesmaids are singing, badly, to the tune of a Sabrina Carpenter hit, and every verse is worse news for the groom. Andrew Dismukes is the groom. The song walks through a bachelorette trip and a stranger called Domingo until it is plain that his bride was unfaithful on it. The sketch belongs to Marcello Hernández, who arrives mid-song to serenade her, but the laugh depends on the man receiving the news, and Dismukes is that man in a sketch viewers have now watched millions of times.

That is the odd shape of his career on Saturday Night Live. The audience knows him best as the person the joke happens to. Inside the studio he started as something else, a writer hired to build jokes, and the sketches he leads himself still look like a writer’s work: a premise set up with care and then pushed long past the point where a sensible person would stop, or a setup planted early that only pays off an hour later. He is a comedian who writes the bit and is most often cast to receive it.

Dismukes was born in Houston on June 21, 1995, and grew up in Port Neches, a small Gulf Coast city near the Louisiana border. He is of Cajun descent. After Port Neches-Groves High School he went to the University of Texas at Austin to study radio, television and film, and started doing stand-up in 2013, his freshman year. The Austin clubs became his training ground. In 2016 he finished runner-up in the Funniest Person in Austin contest run by Cap City Comedy Club.

He graduated in 2017 and moved fast. That summer he was picked for the New Faces showcase at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, which led to an audition for SNL, and in the autumn he joined the writing staff for the show’s 43rd season. The staff he was part of earned Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 2018 and 2019. In the same stretch he took the lead in Call Me Brother, a small, rough-edged comedy written by Christina Parrish and directed by David Howe, in which he played Tony opposite Parrish. The two shared a Special Jury Award for Performance at the Florida Film Festival in 2018; the film reached virtual cinemas in November 2020.

By then he had crossed to the other side of the camera. Dismukes joined the cast as a featured player in September 2020, in a pandemic season with an unusually crowded ensemble. Texas Monthly, reviewing that first year, counted him among only a handful of Texans ever to make the cast and noted that he had arrived straight from Port Neches through Austin stand-up, without the usual detour through Chicago or Los Angeles. His first Weekend Update appearance leaned openly on his Texan identity. In 2022 he was promoted to repertory player.

The part that made him recognizable arrived in October 2024. In “Domingo”, created by writers Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O’Sullivan, he plays Matthew, the husband of Chloe Fineman’s Kelsey, whose friends keep revealing her affair in song. The first sketch passed 11 million YouTube views within about six weeks. Matthew returned at a baby shower, at a vow renewal in the 50th anniversary special in February 2025, where Pedro Pascal turned up as Domingo’s brother, and at his own 30th birthday party in an October 2025 cold open. Around those appearances Dismukes built a steadier body of work: “Jingle Pitch” with James Austin Johnson, a frequent collaborator; a Weekend Update double act with Ashley Padilla as two people who have just hooked up; and a surprise singing turn in “Rasta Driver”.

The trouble with this record is how little of it is his own. Matthew is a gift with a cost. The character exists to absorb a premise someone else wrote and a punchline someone else delivers, and his success has made Dismukes most visible in the role that uses the least of what he does. When he leads, the results are stranger and more fragile. On October 3, 2026, he closed the Dakota Johnson episode with “Amazing Tales of Truth”, co-written with Carl Tart: a Rod Serling-style anthology host who sets up a miracle and then explains that nothing supernatural happened. It was designed as a two-part runner. The show ran long, the second half was cut, and the aired half, at under two and a half minutes, became the programme’s shortest live sketch since 2021. The full version only appeared days later on YouTube under the “Cut for Time” label. It is the clearest picture of the job he actually does: comedy built on structure, in a live format that does not always leave room for the structure to finish.

His screen work outside the show has followed the same instinct for ensembles. He voices Matt in The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, the animated Prime Video series created by Cirocco Dunlap, whose two seasons in 2024 and 2025 put him alongside Keke Palmer, Stephanie Hsu, Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph. This summer he joined the Broken Lizard troupe in Super Troopers 3, directed by Jay Chandrasekhar and released by Searchlight Pictures on August 7, 2026. He plays Trooper Coy Burns, an eager newcomer who gets on the nerves of two veteran officers, which is close to a description of an SNL featured player’s first season. The film drew mixed reviews and took close to eight million dollars in its first month.

Dismukes returned for season 52, which opened on September 26, 2026, and is his seventh as a cast member. Fineman and Bowen Yang have gone; he is now one of the longer-serving faces in the room. On October 10 he played Sam I Am in a Green Eggs and Ham parody opposite Mikey Day and host Shane Gillis. Away from the studio, he married the comedian and actress Aly Dixon in 2025.

Super Troopers 3 arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on November 3. The more telling test is in Studio 8H, every Saturday this season: whether the comedian who writes the trap gets more nights to spring it himself, all the way to the second half.

Tags: actors, comedians, Saturday Night Live, Marcello Hernández, James Austin Johnson, Andrew Dismukes, Super Troopers 3, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy

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