Ready to Go Back to Lonely Island?

Photo-Illustration: Vulture

On December 17, 2005, a tremor rippled through New York City as two doofy white guys faux-rapped (or “frapped”) about mackin’ on Magnolia Cupcakes and hittin’ The Chronicles of Narnia on a formless weekend afternoon. The men in question are, of course, a young Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, performing on the now-legendary digital short “Lazy Sunday.” The vid was written by the Lonely Island — the comedy trio of Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, all early in their Saturday Night Live tenure — and produced as one of the very first SNL Digital Shorts. The video was well-received on the broadcast, but the thing burned through the cultural stratosphere after unofficial rips were uploaded to YouTube, then just mere months in existence. Those clips swiftly racked up previously unimaginable view counts, and “Lazy Sunday” became one of the first objects to achieve internet virality in the modern sense. You can bet that the three-minute-long video will feature prominently in The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (an admirably generic title), which launched earlier this week with the premise of convening the trio to talk through their body of digital shorts.

Yeah, it’s another rewatch podcast, that still-ballooning genre featuring the actual participants of the object being reappraised. Such works essentially serve as extended oral histories, and good ones are mostly hard to come by. As a listener, I usually find it hard to navigate past the arbitrariness of the enterprise or, more pointedly, the emotional sense that nostalgia is a swamp; the past as a morass causing the people revisiting it to be forever stuck in place. When it works, though, it’s usually because the stories are good, the vibes are strong, and the project actually serves its function to situate you within the era around the work being discussed. Actually taking the “history” of oral history seriously, in other words.

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast feels like it’s checking off those boxes, even at this early stage. The first episode is largely throat-clearing stuff, as it has to perform the customary task of swiftly establishing the trio’s oft-told origin story and path into SNL. But even then, something’s clicking, and it has plenty to do with Meyers, who serves here as de facto host, anchor, and interlocutor. Meyers, whom you can also find on the Apple Charts podcasting about vacations with his brother Josh on Family Trips, factors into this history because the Lonely Island’s ascendance took place during his tenure as head writer (2006-2014); early in the first episode, he talks about the trio’s integration into SNL as a kind of pivot point for when he started to feel settled in the role.

But Meyers is also doing a lot of small things to keep the show from being unfocused or overly navel-gazey. One of the first stories told pertains to the ill-fated Spider-Man musical, Turn Off the Dark, which became this disastrous media spectacle in the run-up to its 2011 Broadway opening due to the litany of backstage accidents that took place during rehearsal; an unfortunate but unambiguously funny thing that became fodder for material in Meyers’s writers’ room. The tale seems only tangentially related to the Lonely Island, a shaggy bit of shoot-the-shit on a hangout pod. Which is true, but in telling this story, Meyers is also establishing the scene and vividly conjuring the feeling of that particular moment in time: the mid-to-late 2000s stretch when we were not yet addicted to smartphones; when the superhero film genre was defined by very good movies by Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan; when Magnolia Cupcakes were still hot commodities; and when three doofy guys could move the culture with a string of music parodies that were so phallic, so stupid, and so utterly sublime. For a certain layer within the once-scorned millennial generation (namely, mine, which was in college when those tracks were coming out), the Lonely Island was deeply formative. To my surprise, while writing this, I realize I can still recite more than a few Lonely Island bangers by memory: “I’m on a Boat,” “Dick in a Box,” “Motherlover,” “Jizz in My Pants,” etc. What can I say? I was a teen boy once.

Indeed, when viewed from an angle, the trio’s discography can be said to be a distilled time-capsule bottling of American culture right before its descent into social-media hell. This further supports the historiographical interestingness of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. Let’s go back to “Lazy Sunday,” which turned out to be equally noteworthy for comedy and internet historians alike. The short’s success cemented the trio’s standing within Saturday Night Live, and not only would they go on to function as SNL’s bridge into digital ubiquity — just think about how many people primarily interface with the show on YouTube today instead of actually watching the broadcast — but their contributions would play a meaningful role in helping usher in a new age for the institution. (Not to overstate their impact, of course: This era was also defined by a cohort that included Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and Fred Armisen, among others.)

“Lazy Sunday” was also a very early instance of a defining tension in what we now know as the platform economy. Back in December 2005, YouTube barely possessed name recognition, let alone a business model, when the short spread like wildfire on the service. YouTube would be acquired by Google for $1.6 billion less than a year later, partly off the cultural momentum and conversations about the digital video’s power generated by the virality of “Lazy Sunday,” but the Lonely Island, SNL, and NBC would never directly benefit from the phenomenon they created. “You couldn’t kind of write a story about YouTube without mentioning us,” Schaffer told Variety back in 2015, as part of an oral history celebrating the short’s ten-year anniversary. “But we didn’t end up selling Lonely Island to Google for $1.6 billion.” In so many ways, the Lonely Island was at the precipice of things that made the world we know today, which makes this podcast a bit of oral history I’m looking forward to digging into.