Twenty years ago today, on December 17, 2005, The Lonely Island changed the course of Saturday Night Live history with “Lazy Sunday.”
By now, it’s a familiar story in SNL lore: the home movie-style music video starring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell became one of the earliest viral hits on YouTube. The brand-new streaming site had formed earlier that year, and formally launched just two days before “Lazy Sunday” aired. A fan who caught the sketch live uploaded it to the site, bringing millions of new eyeballs to the short and putting YouTube on the map. The success prompted NBC to embrace digital distribution (and serve a few takedown notices), bringing SNL and online virality together for the first time.
“Lazy Sunday” wasn’t even the first Digital Short. Two weeks earlier, on December 3, The Lonely Island aired their first pre-taped effort, “Lettuce.” They had dubbed it an “SNL Digital Short,” borrowing the name from a series of shorts that former head writer Adam McKay contributed around 2000. Short films had been a part of SNL’s history since day one, when Albert Brooks contributed weekly films during the show’s very first season. But thanks to its low-budget look, distinct absurdity, and a stroke of perfect timing, “Lazy Sunday” helped spur a new era at Saturday Night Live.
As much as its reputation precedes it, there’s more to know about the Digital Short that changed everything. Since Lonely Island “trivia’s the illest,” here are six “double true” facts about “Lazy Sunday.”
1. The dudes got thrifty.
The Lonely Island’s earliest Digital Shorts were as low-budget as they look. As the group revealed on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, the song “Lazy Sunday” was recorded on a laptop that Jorma Taccone had bought on Craigslist.
That scrappiness extended to locations, too. Case in point: When Andy Samberg raps about waking up, he’s in his actual bedroom. The West Village apartment that he shared with fellow Lonely Islander Akiva Schaffer starred in several early Digital Shorts.
When Samberg and Parnell are “parked in their seats” for movie trivia, they’re actually at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, owned by the improv group of the same name co-founded by SNL castmate Amy Poehler.
2. Magnolia Bakery tried to kick them out.
By the time Samberg and Parnell “hit up Magnolia [to] mack on some cupcakes,” the West Village bakery had already achieved a level of fame thanks to local buzz and a cameo on Sex and the City. Perhaps that’s why the bakery felt they could throw their weight around when a couple of guys started rapping outside their storefront.
“We shot a couple shots outside, and then a woman who worked there came outside and told me that she had called the owner [and] we were not allowed to be taping,” Schaffer recalled on the podcast. But Schaffer had already confirmed with NBC lawyers that they were allowed to film freely on any New York street, as long as no tripod was touching the ground.
The Magnolia employee claimed the owner had instructed them to take The Lonely Island’s tapes. The group refused, but agreed to leave. When the guys recounted the story in the press after “Lazy Sunday” had become a bonafide hit, Magnolia began sending “hundreds of cupcakes” and banana pudding to The Lonely Island’s shoots, free of charge.
3. It wasn’t the only big hit that week.
The short aired during SNL’s Season 31 Christmas episode, which is fondly remembered for a number of reasons. Actor Jack Black commanded the show in his third turn as host, leading an episode packed with wall-to-wall holiday sketches and music from Neil Young. In fact, “Lazy Sunday” was preceded by the debut of another short that would become a staple of SNL highlight reels and holiday specials: Robert Smigel’s “Christmastime for the Jews.”
Singer Darlene Love, who sang on Smigel’s claymation short, appeared in studio for a quick performance snippet as the show went to break. In addition to Love, the episode featured cameos from Johnny Knoxville, Black’s Tenacious D partner Kyle Gass, and SNL alum Tracy Morgan.
4. It inspired copycats.
“Lazy Sunday” wasn’t just one of the earliest viral videos, but one of the earliest social media trends. In the months after it aired, it inspired a slew of imitations online, from original West Coast and Midwest responses to kids lip-syncing the lyrics. These fan videos often gained hundreds of thousands of views—and some got the attention of The Lonely Island themselves, who shared their favorites on their website. Within a year, Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute parodied “Lazy Sunday” on The Office.
5. Andy Samberg wore Supreme before it was cool… until “Lazy Sunday” blew up.
As another exercise in thriftiness, Samberg’s wardrobe for the shoot consisted of his actual coat: a black-and-red, fur-lined parka he had taken a shining to in New York’s original Supreme store. After the video’s wild success, Samberg couldn’t wear the coat in public, lest he be recognized as the “Lazy Sunday” guy.
“This was the collateral damage of ‘Lazy Sunday’ that no one likes to talk about,” Taccone joked to GQ. Samberg would eventually bust the jacket out of his closet to perform “Lazy Sunday” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2010, and again for his SNL farewell opus, “Lazy Sunday 2.”
6. The video’s success extended beyond YouTube.
The Lonely Island quickly got a sense of how impactful “Lazy Sunday” had been. Ten days after the sketch aired, the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff profiled the video and the group behind it. With all eyes upon them and SNL on holiday break, The Lonely Island’s agents encouraged them to fly to Los Angeles for “a round of high-level meetings” with studio heads. It was a quantum leap from when the trio had departed L.A. for SNL just months earlier.
“All of a sudden we went from, like, unemployed, $70,000-budget pilots to meeting with studio heads at movie companies,” Schaffer recalled on the podcast.
The attention also came from within SNL’s ranks. In the Times profile, Parnell recounted how he had gotten a call shortly after “Lazy Sunday” aired. It was from castmate Maya Rudolph, who was out on maternity leave at the time, and her partner Paul Thomas Anderson, calling to congratulate him on what they knew would be a hit sketch.
