He is the son of a Cuban mother and a Dominican father and, for a few months, he has become one of the trendy names in American comedy. Marcello Hernández, born in 1997 in Miami, has just premiered his first comedy special on Netflix, American boya monologue in which he quips about the singularities of growing up in a Latino family and in which he also jokes about the racist breeding ground that lives in the United States. In the monologue, Donald Trump is not mentioned at any time, but there is no need: many of his gags are aimed at xenophobic ideas that the president of the country has been responsible for spreading and reinforcing.
Hernández began to become popular after joining the cast of the long-running comedy show Saturday night livewhere he has been working since 2022. He is the first generation Z actor to be part of the program and has already cultivated famous and viral sketches, such as the one of the seductive Domingo who crashes a wedding or the one of the overprotective Latina mother in which Pedro Pascal participated (they made a sequel of this one where Bad Bunny also appeared as an aunt). Although on some occasions he has had to face criticism that criticized him for speaking in Spanish in some of the sketches – he has confessed that his mother was persecuting his enemies through a fake Instagram account -, right now he is one of the great superstars of SNL and he uses it to claim his origins as the son of immigrants. “Many of the jokes I make and the things I write have to do with my relationship with my mother when I was growing up. She went through a lot to be able to get to the United States and be able to build a name and a life for herself, and that’s why I respect her a lot and trust her judgment a lot,” explained the young comedian in an interview with Variety. Hernández’s mother emigrated from Cuba with her family when she was 12 years old. First they settled in Spain, later in the Dominican Republic, and finally, she alone immigrated to the United States. There she managed to study at university and graduated while already pregnant with her son.
funny crimes
Like many fellow comedians of the same generation, Hernandez began making his way through social media and made humorous videos about Miami on the TikTok channel Only in Dadededicated to the county where the city of Florida is located. After graduating in entrepreneurship and communication at John Carroll University in Ohio, he decided to move to New York to pursue a career in the world ofstand-up. In 2022, he was chosen as the new face of comedy at the Just for Laughs festival, which is held every July in Montreal, Canada, and which served as a springboard for him to enter SNL. Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer, calls Hernández an “extraordinary talent.” “It gets better every time. After a while a SNL you can tell the people who belong there: he’s one of them,” Michaels assured a Variety a couple of years ago.
In his first monologue for Netflix, Hernández turns to comedy of manners by focusing on things that are quite explored by other comedians such as the differences between men and women in the world of dating and personal relationships. The special grows in interest as it navigates the territory of the education that Latino children receive and gets really poignant toward the end, when it directly attacks hate speech toward immigrants. That’s when Hernandez fires back at preconceived notions such as that all Latino immigrants are criminals, reminding viewers that Latino crimes are “fun, exciting and movie-worthy,” while white crimes are “horrifying and documentary-worthy.” “I want to say one thing to white people who think that Latino immigrants are scary: if you’re white and you think that Latino immigrants come to America to take everything from little children and put them in a basement, no, that’s your business. We don’t do this kind of crime, we don’t like our own children. Why should we take any children? “, he says in one of the most celebrated moments of the special.
While he triumphs with his monologue and SNLthe comedian, who mirrors himself in comics like Bill Murray, begins to take discreet steps in the cinema. At the moment it will be one of the voices of Shrek 5where he will play one of the children of the Green Ogre and his wife, Princess Fiona.
