Fred Armisen

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 to a German mother and Korean father. For much of his life, Armisen thought his paternal grandfather Ehara Masami was Japanese. However, Masami (better known by his professional name Masami Kuni or birth name Park Yeong-in) 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 emigrated 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.