Comic Says ‘SNL’ Ripped Off His ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ Bit This Weekend

Andrew Dismukes got some shine in the Saturday Night Live spotlight this weekend. He and Ego Nwodim play a young couple trying to convince their skeptical parents that their interracial romance will stand the test of time. To prove his love, Dismukes breaks out a ukulele to sing a song he wrote about their love — Train’s, er, his “Hey, Soul Sister.” 

It’s a one-joke premise — can you believe this piece-of-crap hit was so cringe? — entirely tied to Dismukes’ committing to the bit. He does so to B+ effect, but one comic in New York was crying foul after the sketch aired.

Comedian Demetrius Fields took to Instagram to complain: “Someone at Saturday Night Live ripped off my bit last night so here’s a recording of me doing it from last May,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 5 months in a lot of the same rooms people who work on that show are in.” 

Maybe Fields should have just left well enough alone. While he brought the receipts, proving that he’d joked about “Hey, Soul Sister” earlier this year, his observation that Train’s music video featured a gaggle of white women dancing doesn’t seem to have much in common with Dismuke’s painful cover.

Another problem for Fields: Goofing on this song isn’t exactly new territory. As LateNighter points out, people have been calling out those lame lyrics from the moment the song was released 15 years ago. In 2010, the Dallas Observer complained that the song’s protagonist “just noticed the only Black girl at the party, and he's improvising a song to impress her with his limited knowledge of African-American nomenclature.”

That same year, The Village Voice called “Hey, Soul Sister” “pretty much the whitest song to ever have the word ‘soul’ in it.” 

“Is he just making fun of black people???” wrote a since-deleted Redditor in 2017. “I’m truly perplexed.” 

And comedian @Kevonstage was riffing on those lyrics last November, six months before Fields posted his video. In fact, his bit about the “so gangsta, I’m so thug” line feels closer to inspiring the Saturday Night Live sketch than Fields’ joke. (No, the sketch didn’t rip off @Kevonstage either.) 

Even Cracked has been in on the act, including the song on our list of 15 Cringiest Lyrics of the 2000s. “No middle-aged white guy should be allowed to describe himself as ‘thug’ unless he’s literally Al Capone.”

All of which to say, “Hey, Soul Sister” is a terrible embarrassment, and calling that out isn’t grounds for accusations of joke theft. Even Fields acknowledged that fact, admitting in his Insta that, “Maybe it was parallel thinking.”

Or maybe we all hate that song.