Druski and Marcello Hernandez Did a Dominican Sketch on SNL, But Not Everyone Was Laughing

Saturday Night Live has built its legacy on satire, on comedy that pokes at power, culture and the absurdities of American life. The sketch that aired on the November 7 episode did not sit well with some Dominican and Latino audiences.

The segment, titled “Bubu Mobile,” featured comedians Marcello Hernandez and Druski playing employees at a cell phone shop. The humor leaned on exaggerated Dominican accents, broken English, jokes about personal space and references to infidelity. Many viewers felt the sketch reduced an entire community to a set of tired cultural caricatures rather than anything resembling actual satire.

Why Marcello Hernandez’s Involvement Stung

Hernandez is of Dominican descent, and his decision to participate in the sketch left some audiences disappointed, particularly those who expected more from someone with direct cultural ties to the community being depicted. The criticism was never about whether Dominican culture can be the subject of comedy. It was about whether the comedy said anything real, or whether it recycled images that have historically been used to diminish Latino immigrants.

The Difference Between Satire and Stereotype

Comedy has always had room to exaggerate and to make audiences uncomfortable in ways that reveal something true. The conversation that “Bubu Mobile” reopened is about what happens when ethnicity becomes the punchline rather than the frame. When accent, language difficulty and cultural behavior are the entire joke, with no subversion and no perspective built in, the result tends to land very differently on the communities being depicted than on audiences watching from the outside.

What the Response Reveals

Dominican audiences have watched their culture gain real visibility in U.S. pop culture over the past several years, through music, through film, through the growing presence of Dominican artists in spaces that once ignored them entirely. That visibility makes moments like this one land harder, because the expectation of thoughtful representation has grown alongside it. SNL has not responded publicly to the criticism, and Hernandez has not addressed it directly. The conversation, however, is very much still happening.