“You know, a lot of people in New York City are walking around looking for that Sex and the City stoop,” Seth Meyers points out on the first episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. “Meanwhile, the Digital Short stoop is two and a half blocks away.”
While Meyers was being facetious, it’s true that just around the corner from Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment building is a building that served as the site of Saturday Night Live history. In fact, it helped change the face of the internet altogether.
It was in that six-story walkup on West 10th Street, just off Bleecker, that Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer were sharing an apartment during their early days on SNL—and right on its front steps where the troupe filmed some of their most influential work.
Made up of Samberg, Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, The Lonely Island joined Saturday Night Live in 2005. Following the group’s work creating web videos and writing for the MTV Movie Awards, Samberg was hired as a cast member while Schaffer and Taccone joined as writers. But despite the viral video focus of their work up until that point, the group didn’t immediately start producing Digital Shorts for SNL.
As they recall in their podcast with Meyers, the group started out trying to stage the kind of live sketches the show was known for, but nothing was taking off. “It really felt like we were failing at the live portion of this show,” Taccone says. “[On] our first off-week, me and Kiv were very kind of embittered and feeling like sh*t.” The two ultimately decided to do what they do best, and film a short video for fun.
The result was “The Bing Bong Brothers,” a music video inspired by the Ying Yang Twins’ “Whisper Song.” The video starts and ends with Schaffer sitting on the stoop of an apartment building, listening to music.
“The doorstep of your actual apartment at the time,” Meyers points out.
Schaffer and Taccone posted the video online, and soon after it was played on the G4 Network. When they returned to SNL in November, producers Mike Shoemaker and Steve Higgins were impressed with their work on the short.
“I remember Higgins and Shoemaker sat us down,” Samberg recalls, “and told the three of us, ‘Hey, if you guys want to make something like that, but using Andy or using the cast, or both, that would be great.’”
With that, The Lonely Island made their first pre-tape, branding it with the “Digital Short” label that writer Adam McKay had used for his videos in previous seasons. That short was “Lettuce,” in which Will Forte (who conceived the sketch) comforts a troubled friend while they both casually snack on heads of lettuce. It’s all shot on the same stoop.
“Saving a buck or two on locations,” Taccone says on their podcast episode about the sketch.
“Lettuce” was cut for time after playing in one or two dress rehearsals, but finally aired on December 3, 2005. It went over well enough.
“It wasn’t a huge hit but it worked,” then-writer Colin Jost recalls in the book Live from New York, “and it was a new voice.”
So the group shot “Peyote,” a direct sequel. In that one, again conceived by Forte, Will desperately tries to stop Andy from jumping off a ledge, pleading with him through a bullhorn. A wide shot ultimately reveals that they’ve been on the ground the whole time. They’re just feet away from the “Lettuce” stoop, pressed up against the neighboring building.
“Peyote” didn’t air until the penultimate episode of the season the following May. “Shoemaker was like, ‘Maybe try something completely different. Don’t just do the same thing twice in a row,’” Schaffer recalls.
The group went back to the drawing board for the December 17th episode—and back to their roots. Fake raps—or “frapping” as they called it—had been a standout part of the group’s content before SNL. Then through the Bing Bong Brothers, it got them the chance to make Digital Shorts their bread and butter at the show.
What resulted was “Lazy Sunday,” the rap about two bros (Samberg and Chris Parnell) pumped to be seeing the new Chronicles of Narnia movie. They shot the video on the morning of December 15. Like the other shorts, it begins with a shot of that same NYC apartment building.
“You were in the most populous city in America, and you couldn’t even find a second stoop,” Meyers jokes. “It was our stoop though,” Samberg replies. “We felt safe there.”
As was the case with other early Digital Shorts, it came down to where they could shoot for free and avoid location permits. “We didn’t want to get in trouble. We wanted to save money on locations, so we shot in front of Andy and Akiva’s apartment,” Taccone says.
In fact, those early shorts were basically done at no cost. “[We] made the very first one, Lettuce, for twenty bucks,” Schaffer recalls in Live from New York, “and then we made Lazy Sunday for just the cost of the cab fare.” He also reveals that the interior of their apartment was utilized for “Lazy Sunday,” too. “It starts with [Andy] on the bed. That’s his real bed in his real bedroom.”
When “Lazy Sunday” aired on SNL that week, it was a hit.
In a full-circle moment of sorts, the first sign that Samberg noticed the sketch’s effect was the very next morning, on that same stoop. “That Sunday, I get up and walk out of the building, and some guy was like, ‘Hey, I love your Narnia rap!’” he told The AV Club in 2007. “I was on my stoop; I hadn’t even gotten to the street yet.”
“It brought a breath of fresh air to the show,” Parnell told the New York Times, revealing that Maya Rudolph and Paul Thomas Anderson had reached out to him praising it shortly after it aired. “It’s something the likes of which we haven’t seen on SNL anytime recently.” Some even credited the sketch with reviving SNL entirely.
But the real impact of “Lazy Sunday” came in the days after the live broadcast, when it became something the internet hadn’t seen before. Twelve hours after it aired, a fan uploaded the sketch to YouTube. The video-sharing site was still in its infancy, having only launched ten months earlier. Yet within weeks, the clip had surpassed a then-impressive 1 million views.
“I’ve been recognized more times since the Saturday it aired than since I started on the show,” Samberg told The New York Times less than two weeks after it debuted. “It definitely felt like something changed overnight.”
By early 2006, the video had hit 5 million views. NBC had it taken down, along with 500 other illegally uploaded clips. “Lazy Sunday” was so beneficial to YouTube that, according to the company, they tried to make a deal with NBC that would allow them to keep the clips on the site.
NBC Universal balked, choosing instead to upload videos like “Lazy Sunday” to the NBC website and to sell them on iTunes. YouTube, however, continued to grow. Less than a year later, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. NBC Universal’s general counsel would later claim that “Lazy Sunday” was responsible for YouTube’s popularity.
Regardless of the sketch’s monetary impact on the value of the video-sharing site, it’s fair to say that “Lazy Sunday” helped ignite the culture of viral videos and, in turn, ushered in an era of networks clipping out their content and embracing digital distribution. And it all started with a stoop in the Village.
“People always joke to us about how we made YouTube huge, but I think we were more just fortunate in having incredible timing,” Samberg says in Live from New York. “That we happened to have something people really wanted to watch at the moment computers got fast enough to stream it.”
Still, even if not fully serious, Samberg made sure to shout out the hand that The Lonely Island played in building YouTube during his final episode of Saturday Night Live. For that show in 2012, the group trotted out a long-awaited sequel to the short that made them: “Lazy Sunday 2.”
“Still waitin’ on a f—ing YouTube check,” Samberg fraps.
