Andrew Dismukes: Live from New York

A cou­ple of years ago I was at a show, watch­ing a new­er come­di­an absolute­ly kill on stage. He was describ­ing his small home­town in a joke and I kept think­ing, ​“This sounds too famil­iar.” Then the com­ic says, ​“Port Nech­es, Texas,” and there it was…the small town that was only about five miles from my home­town. This was my intro­duc­tion to Andrew Dis­mukes. I knew, then and there, I loved his com­e­dy and I HAD to inter­view him.

Start­ing around fifth grade, Dis­mukes remem­bers writ­ing skits in the Boy Scouts to per­form around the camp­fire, and as if it were life’s great fore­shad­ow­ing, this is his first mem­o­ry of show­ing an inter­est in com­e­dy. Want­i­ng to pur­sue com­e­dy and screen­writ­ing, Dis­mukes enrolled in The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Austin’s Radio-Tele­vi­sion-Film pro­gram. It was in his first year of col­lege that he decid­ed to try his first open mic. It went well enough to be encour­ag­ing, but he knew his stand up need­ed work. While his orig­i­nal goal of writ­ing was still impor­tant, Dis­mukes found the imme­di­ate audi­ence feed­back you get from stand up real­ly helped him improve his skills as a writer dramatically.

As a young writer and stand up, Andrew Dis­mukes seems to write to a broad audi­ence. In prepar­ing for his inter­view, I was dis­cussing Dis­mukes with sea­soned com­ic, Matt Bear­den. Bear­den not­ed the matu­ri­ty of Dis­mukes’ joke writ­ing, stat­ing, ​“He’s not fill­ing sets with ref­er­ences that don’t reach beyond his peer group…” which lends to sets that appeal to all.

By the next year he was already being booked on The Out of Bounds Com­e­dy Fes­ti­val. Dis­mukes attrib­ut­es a lot of his momen­tum to his place­ment as a final­ist in Fun­ni­est Per­son In Austin in 2015. By 2017, he would be one of the New Faces at the Just for Laughs Fes­ti­val.

Mov­ing to Los Ange­les to com­plete his final semes­ter of col­lege in Jan­u­ary 2017, Dis­mukes was perched in a great spot to launch the next stage of his career. Lit­tle did he know how far that launch would take him. By Sep­tem­ber of the same year, he was mov­ing to New York as one of the new writ­ers of Sat­ur­day Night Live.

If all of this was­n’t excit­ing enough, Andrew Dis­mukes has a film com­ing out, Call Me Broth­er, co-starred and writ­ten by past Com­e­dy Wham guest, Christi­na Par­rish. The pair recent­ly won a spe­cial jury award for their per­for­mance in the film at the Flori­da Film Festival.

Check out the inter­view to hear more about his start and this excit­ing first sea­son with SNL. After the sur­re­al feel­ing of grad­u­at­ing and wrap­ping his first sea­son with SNL all in the same year, one can only imag­ine what is next for the incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed Andrew Dismukes.