How “Lazy Sunday” Changed ‘SNL’—and the Internet—Forever

The internet was a very different place 20 years ago this week, when “Lazy Sunday” first aired on Saturday Night Live. In a pre-YouTube world, comedy sketches didn’t go viral. At the beginning of the 21^st century, not many websites hosted videos, and people’s home WiFi struggled to play them. In 2005, however, YouTube was born—a new, bottomless platform for people to upload their own comedy.

In the winter of 2005 The Lonely Island were several months into their first season at Saturday Night Live, where Andy Samberg had been hired as a performer and Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone had joined the show as writers. Casting around for ideas for the ninth episode of season 31, the trio tried a rap parody, something they had only ever done for their comparatively modest fanbase. So it was that the other thing born in 2005—December 17, to be precise—was Lazy Sunday, the first Lonely Island comedy song SNL ever broadcast. Everything changed. Suddenly, as Seth Meyers put it, there was “this new added element that became a vital piece to the last two decades of the show.”

Here, The Lonely Island—as well as Meyers, and Chris Parnell, the other star of “Lazy Sunday”—look back after two decades and share how they turned a cold walk around Manhattan into internet comedy history.

Akiva Schaeffer: The three of us grew up in Berkeley, California, which to us at least felt like a place where music was a very important part of the culture. For us, everything revolved around music; comedy, what TV shows we were watching, and where we were getting lunch. We knew hip-hop in a different way that allowed us to make our parodies way more accurate—whereas if I was doing a grunge Nirvana parody it would have been very surface-level, because I’ve listened to those albums but I don’t know every detail. And none of us knew how to play any instruments.

Jorma Taccone: Obviously the three of us had been doing that non-stop. We didn’t come from the world of improv, we didn’t come from doing Groundlings or Improv Olympic or UCB or anything.

Schaffer: Me and Jorm had made a song a year or two before, back in LA, that was just on our website, called The Heist.