Fred Armisen


Fereydun Robert Armisen is an American comedian, actor, musician, and television writer. With his comedy partner Carrie Brownstein, he co-created and co-starred in the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia. He also co-created and starred in the mockumentary IFC series Documentary Now! and the Showtime comedy series Moonbase 8.
Armisen was the bandleader and frequent drummer for the Late Night with Seth Meyers house band, the 8G Band from 2014 to 2024. He was a cast member on the late-night sketch comedy and variety series Saturday Night Live from 2002 to 2013. He voiced Speedy Gonzales on The Looney Tunes Show. He also works as a voice actor in films, such as The Smurfs, The Smurfs 2, The House of Tomorrow, The Lego Ninjago Movie, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Contestant, Thelma the Unicorn and Fixed.
Armisen has acted in comedy films, including EuroTrip, Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Ex, and The Dictator. He is also notable for his guest-star appearances in television shows such as 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, New Girl, Broad City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Difficult People, The Last Man on Earth, Toast of Tinseltown, Our Flag Means Death, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Modern Family, and Barry.
Armisen received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album for Standup for Drummers in 2019. He has also won two Peabody Awards, one in 2008 as part of the Saturday Night Live political satire cast and one in 2011 for Portlandia. From 2019 to 2022, he co-starred and served as writer and executive producer on the Spanish-language series Los Espookys, which he co-created.

Early life

Armisen was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on December 4, 1966, the son of schoolteacher Hildegardt Mirabal Level and IBM employee Fereydun Herbert Armisen. He moved with his family to New York as a baby, and briefly lived in Brazil in his youth. He was raised in Valley Stream, New York, where he was a classmate of fellow SNL alumnus Jim Breuer. He attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan before dropping out to begin a career as a rock drummer. He said that he was inspired to perform after seeing the Clash and Devo perform on television, and wanted to be a performer since he was a child.
Armisen's mother was Venezuelan, born in San Fernando de Apure, while his father was born in Soltau, Germany, to a German mother and Korean father. For much of his life, Armisen thought his paternal grandfather Ehara Masami was Japanese. However, Masami was actually Korean and came from Ulsan; he adopted a Japanese name and persona after the massacre of Koreans in 1923 when he was a high school student. Park studied aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University and became a professional dancer before moving to Germany. After the war, he returned to Japan, and formed a premier modern dance company. He eventually immigrated to the US, where he taught dance at what is now Cal State Fullerton from 1964 to 1975. Park Yeong-in's family were members of the Korean aristocracy, and Armisen's Korean lineage can be verifiably traced back to the 1600s.

Career

Music

In 1984, Armisen played drums in a local band along with his high school friends in Valley Stream, New York, but the group soon ended. In 1988, he moved to Chicago to play drums for the punk rock band Trenchmouth, and in the 1990s he played background drums with Blue Man Group.
Armisen played drums on three tracks for Les Savy Fav's 2007 album Let's Stay Friends, as well as tracks for Matthew Sweet's 2011 album Modern Art and Wandering Lucy's 1996 album Leap Year.
Armisen has served as the music director and frequent drummer of the 8G Band, the house band for Late Night with Seth Meyers, since February 24, 2014. The band was laid off at the end of the 2023–2024 season due to budget cuts from NBC.
In 2018, Armisen played drums as part of Devo at John Waters' Burger Boogaloo festival in Oakland, California.
In July 2021, he performed at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.
In September 2025, Armisen released an album of sound effects titled 100 Sound Effects on the independent record label Drag City. The album features contributions from Mary Lynn Rajskub, Amber Coffman, Tim Heidecker, and Riki Lindhome. Armisen dedicated the album to the late Steve Albini.
File:Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres and Fred Armisen los espookys.jpg|thumb|400x400px |Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres and Armisen in "Los Espooky's live" in 2019.

Television and film

While not playing with the band Trenchmouth, Armisen's interests switched to acting. In a January 2006 interview, he said, "I wanted to be on TV somehow. For some reason, I always thought it would be an indirect route; I didn't know that it would be comedy and Saturday Night Live. I just wanted to do something with performing that would lead me there."
Armisen's subsequent television work, such as some "memorable Andy Kaufman–esque appearances" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as work for Crank Yankers and Adult Swim, led to a role in 2002 as a featured player in the cast of Saturday Night Live. In the 2004 season, he was promoted to repertory cast member.
Armisen has landed several minor yet memorable roles that were defined by an interviewer as "feral foreigners" in comedy films such as Eurotrip, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Deck the Halls, The Ex, The Promotion, The Rocker, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, and Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Further television work included an appearance on Parks and Recreation in the 2009 episode "Sister City". For the Cartoon Network series The Looney Tunes Show, Armisen voices Speedy Gonzales. He and fellow Saturday Night Live alums Bill Hader and Seth Meyers write, produce, and star in the IFC mockumentary series Documentary Now! which premiered in 2015.
Armisen starred in the IFC sketch series Portlandia alongside Carrie Brownstein ; the first season debuted on January 21, 2011. With Brownstein, he appeared on the 2012 Simpsons episode "The Day the Earth Stood Cool", in which they play the Simpsons' new neighbors, who encourage everyone to be cool like them.
For his work on Portlandia, Armisen was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 2012, 2013, and 2014 and for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2014.
In 2021, Armisen was executive producer on the documentary Charm Circle, directed by Nira Burstein. In 2022, he appeared in Wednesday as Uncle Fester. In the same year, he appeared in the first season of Our Flag Means Death as Geraldo, a barkeep in the Republic of Pirates and one of Spanish Jackie's husbands. Spanish Jackie was played by Leslie Jones.
In 2024, Armisen appeared as FDA representative Mike Puntz in Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted.

''Saturday Night Live''

Armisen joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2002. He was promoted to a repertory player in 2004. After 11 years as a cast member, he decided to leave the show. At the time of his 2013 departure from the show, Armisen was the third-longest-tenured cast member, and he appeared in the second-highest number of sketches of any cast member. Since then, Armisen has come back for multiple cameo appearances on the show, including when he hosted the season 41 finale on May 21, 2016, with musical guest Courtney Barnett.
The following is a partial list of notable roles Armisen has played in Saturday Night Live sketches.

Recurring characters

  • Billy Smith – a Native American stand-up comedian who tells Native-American-themed jokes that no one understands.
  • Fericito – a Venezuelan nightclub comedian who has his own TV show, Show Biz Grande Explosion with sidekick Manuel.
  • Gunther Kelly – a student at George Washington University who performs songs on Weekend Update with his brother Patrick.
  • Leonard – the strange European host of the foreign music show Club Traxx.
  • Mackey – a senile drummer who often does rimshots at inappropriate moments and appears in the "Rialto Grande" sketches.
  • Nooni Schoener – a quirky, foreign art dealer who appears with his wife Nuni Schoener in "the Schoeners" sketches.
  • Frondi – a mentally challenged character who criticizes Ben Affleck's movie Gigli to Ben himself.
  • Manuel Ortiz – host of The Manuel Ortiz show on Television Dominicana where he "helps with whatever it is" his audience members are going through.
  • Nicholas Fehn – a political commentator whose mind wanders so much that he is incapable of finishing a sentence without starting a new one.
  • Roger A. Trevanti – a greedy studio head and AMPTP member who rails against the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. The character's only SNL appearance was on the last episode of season 33, before the show went on hiatus for the WGA strike, but he appeared in several Internet videos around the same time.
  • Rodger Brush – a producer of multiple "Dr. Phil"-type talk shows, each focused on a different topic, who fills in when the hosts are sick. He repeatedly tells guests relating their problems to speak up, and, unable to relate to their problems, offers them either useless advice based on his experience or no help at all.
  • Garth – part of Garth & Kat, a musical duo who appear on Weekend Update unprepared and make up songs on the spot.
  • Giuseppe – the saxophone player for What's Up With That?
  • Stuart – homeowner from The Californians, a soap opera parody featuring Armisen, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and others as wealthy blondes with Valley girl accents.
  • One of the "Dictator's Two Best Friends from Growing Up" who come to Weekend Update to secretly trash-talk the various dictators with whom they grew up.
  • Regine – a pretentious and condescending woman who exhibits blatant euphoric and erotic facial expressions when touched on certain parts of her body.
  • Ian Rubbish – A late-1970s/early-80s British punk rocker, a parody of Sex Pistols' John Lydon, who caught heat from his bandmates Derek Gash and Keith Grimshaw and fans for writing and performing songs supporting Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.