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As youll see, those rules have served them well.
Cut a hole in a box.The Lonely Island disrupted the distribution and aesthetic of filmed comedy.
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Comedy is all about timing.
YouTube officially launched on December 15, 2005.
The Lonely Island premiered their secondSNLdigital short, Lazy Sunday, two days later.
By 2005, the cast featured an incredible11cast members who had improv backgrounds.
But that wasnt what put them on Lorne Michaelss radar.
No, their big break came working on the 2005 MTV Movie Awards, hosted by Jimmy Fallon.
Samberg was the only one who got the gig.
(Schaffer never auditioned; Michaels passed on Taccone.
)SNLproducers Mike Shoemaker and Steve Higgins told Michaels about the Lonely Islands online sketches.
After the boss watched some of those, he hired Taccone and Schaffer as writers on the show.
But just because youre hired atSNLdoesnt mean you wind up on the air.
But the rejection made them think that live sketches were not the best medium for their ideas.
It played well enough that they got to do another one.
Schaffer credited the shows willingness to embrace video to the fact that it was so cheap.
(Lettuce cost $20.)
At the time, the Lonely Island had never heard of YouTube.
There were, of course, pretaped sketches throughoutSNLs history.
What makes this premise work is exactlywhenSamberg pops in.
Put your junk in the box.Lonely Island found endless ways to make, and satirize, dick jokes.
How did the video suggest that Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone wanted to celebrate?
By sucking their own dicks, of course.
He is not wrong.
The most extreme example might be Were Back, off of theirTurtleneck & Chainalbum.
On that song, each member goes all in on the grossness of their respective penises.
Teenage boys love em.
So the Lonely Island keeps delivering em.
But theres a method to this madness.
Or at least its not as puerile as it might seem.
I think feminism is a word we didnt know existed until we left Berkeley,Schaffer has explained.
At Berkeley it was the norm.
We were raised by [makes air quotes] feminists.
And it has always given their silliness a deeper resonance.
The Lonely Island dont just make dick jokes.
This was evident even before they got onSNL.
The videos Jizz in My Pants and I Just Had Sex satirize the ineptitude and one-dimensionality of manhood.
Or theres Everyones a Critic, which aired on anSNLepisode that Gawker derided as a Gay Minstrel Show.
When addressing the latter directly in his2009Outprofile, Samberg called it bro-gay.
Theyre the ones we have the most fun fucking with.
The Lonely Island got better at making it clear whom they were targeting.
Its a great juxtaposition in general of machoness in pop and rap thats why we go there.
Our intention is not gay focused; the joke is always on being homophobic.
Make her launch the box.The Lonely Island made their weird accessible.
The Lonely Islands trick is to use the pop-culture thing to sneak in the weirder thing.
BeforeSNL,the Lonely Island first made a name for themselves with the Channel 101O.C.spoof, The Bu.
Eventually, the whole thing breaks down into full absurdity.
But again, within the conceptual structure of a parody, it works.
As far as utilizing pop culture, the Lonely Island wouldve never become the Lonely Island without fake rap.
We considered musical comedy kind of a crutch, and fake rap specifically as a lame thing to do.
Theres also the obvious racial dicey-ness.
Its not really your place.
ButSNLs demand for material and competition for camera time made the guys desperate.
Still, they felt they needed to develop a set of criteria that they felt made it okay.
Diaper Money uses rap to mock the fear of growing up.
That very catchy, weird-as-hell song has 150 million YouTube views.
The groups success with this stuff isnt actually all that surprising.
People listen to music without understanding or even caring about the lyrics all the time.
And thats the way you do itThe Lonely Islands double-edged legacy.
Its a problem that they address well withPopstar.
[Its] useful for whatever percentage of the audience doesnt get what were doing.
The joke is clearly on him (andMacklemore).
The character of Conner allows for so much.
The Lonely Islands place in comedy history is secure.
Their shorts gaveSNL, as Seth Meyers explained inLive From New York, a shot of adrenaline.
They altered the perception of the show, turningSaturday Night Liveinto Sunday Morning Online.
And they fostered a generation of online-comedy fans eager to share what theyd seen.
You see the Lonely Islands absurdist take on popular culture inKroll Show.
*A version of this article appears in the May 30, 2016 issue ofNew YorkMagazine.
