The screaming in Manhattan's Virgin Megastore is shrill to deafening. Several
hundred teenage girls and boys - even the odd oldie - are holding their
camera-phones aloft, trying to get a shot of the three goofy young men who
have arrived on stage.
The host of tonight's Q&A session is Paul Rudd, a mainstay of the US TV
comedy show Saturday Night Live, and it takes him a good five minutes to
calm the crowd before he can introduce the members of the Lonely Island, the
show's biggest new stars. The trio - Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva
Schaffer - beam delightedly.
This, ladies and gents, is the face of internet stardom today. Once the web
was the domain of TV wannabes, now it's where the magic happens. At least,
it is for the Lonely Island, and the millions of fans of their comedy songs
on the web. The trio's new Incredibad album is the first comedy album to
reach No 1 in the iTunes chart. Its current single, I'm on a Boat, hit the
No1 spot on YouTube with 28 million views. It's a hilarious send-up of
bling-toting “yacht-rap”, in which Samberg, Schaffer and the rapper T-Pain
leap around a gleaming white pleasure craft boasting about being “on a
motherf***ing boat!” and pursuing related marine activities such as “riding
on a dolphin/ Doing flips and sh**”. The Lonely Island have the top three
clips on the US web channel Hulu; they are bigger than most bands; and right
now, bigger than most comedians.
Their comedy is central to the success of Saturday Night Live, a show that
once brought us Bill Murray, Steve Martin and Chris Rock, and is enjoying a
new lease of life thanks to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impressions. The three
skinny white guys apply themselves to the least appropriate musical genres
possible (hardcore rap, R&B, reggae) with glee. Their songs have
attracted celebrity cameos from Justin Timberlake, Natalie Portman, Norah
Jones and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes. Samberg, the singer, has
himself become an unlikely sex symbol and is currently in a relationship
with the celebrity harpist Joanna Newsom.
Today, flopped on a sofa in Universal Records' swanky headquarters in
Manhattan, the Lonely Island boys are indeed very funny. They have been best
friends since high school.
“We were such scrawny little guys back then,” sighs Schaffer, whose inner
teenage nerd is still the most visible in the group. “High school is when
you separate the nerds from the men,” says Samberg, whose grown-up good
looks almost seem accidental; he is still deferential to the other two, who
were both in the year above him at school (he is 30, they are 31). “That's
certainly the age where you love comedy most in your life,” Taccone says,
“maybe it just didn't wane as much for us.”
The wobbly skits they recorded as teens turned into wobbly pilots for TV
shows, which eventually turned into all three working as writers and
performers on Saturday Night Live. They had grown up watching the show as
well as Monty Python, Mel Brooks and the David Zucker movies (Top Secret,
Airplane!).
A joy in the ridiculous runs through all the Lonely Island's work. It's there
in Space Olympics, with Samberg as the silver-faced host of the sports fest
in the year 3022, emoting sports clichés through a vocoder (the guest is a
straight-faced Michael Phelps).
Their musical spoofs are also insanely catchy. I'm on a Boat is easily a sonic
match for the beefy beats and slick R&Bisms of T-Pain's own hit singles.
“Growing up in Berkeley, California, hip-hop and R&B was what we
all listened to,” Schaffer says. “We are not making fun of that music, we're
more using it as a medium to tell jokes.”
And why does rap lend itself so well to comedy? “Well for one thing, there's a
lot of room for words,” Samberg says, “you can really do some writing. And
hip-hop, from the very beginning, has always had a comedy element.”
The group's most glorious rap moment is the celebrated “Lazy Sunday” skit,
which was viewed five million times on YouTube in its first month. Samberg
and an SNL chum, Chris Parnell, recount a lazy day spent buying cupcakes and
watching The Chronicles of Narnia, in a shouty, thug-rap style.
Then there is Natalie's Rap, the full-on hell-rap written by the trio for the
elfin Natalie Portman, who swaggers, kicks and punches her way through the
video. “What do you want?” shout the guys. “To drink and fight!” Portman
yells, clearly having the time of her life.
But if you want one song to define the trio it must be Dick in a Box. Recorded
with Justin Timberlake, it won an Emmy. This parody of cheesy Nineties R&B
casts Timberlake and Samberg as ratty Romeos, promising to give their ladies
the ultimate gift: “It's my dick in a box, girl ...”
It turns out that the song was written in minutes: Timberlake was due to host
SNL and as a fan of “Lazy Sunday”, he suggested that they sing together.
Lyrics were scribbled down. “And as soon as we showed him,” Taccome says,
“he was like, Yesssss!”
The collaboration is yet another example of the boundaries between music and
comedy becoming increasingly blurred. Look at the success of Flight of the
Conchords or Britain's own Adam & Joe. There is a long lineage. “We are
like the children of Spinal Tap and Weird Al [Yankowitz],” says Samberg. The
latter created the daft 1980s Michael Jackson pastiche Eat It.
“If musical comedy is more popular,” Schaffer says, “my guess is that it's
because the internet is such a good place to see a two-minute, funny little
musical video. Before the internet, your only option was to stay glued to
MTV, or borrow a clunky VHS tape. And it's certainly more motivation to make
something,” Schaffer says, “if you know someone's gonna see it.”
Hence the slew of Lonely Island copycat videos now to be found on YouTube.
Take Jizz In My Pants, for example, a song that started out as a slick,
faux-saucy eurobeat song and has since been reworked by a group of Chinese
physics nerds, by emo kids in their bedrooms, and a young classical pianist.
“It's been really cool to see just how creative everyone seems to be in the
world,” says Taccome, delightedly.
So what's next for the Lonely Island? “Gosh,” Samberg says, flummoxed. “To be
totally honest, we're doing it.”
“Just more friendship,” deadpans Taccome, “I'd like a lot more friendship out
of you guys in the future.” Samberg grins and adds: “I think if the ‘young
us' could look at the ‘now us', I'd be like , Yeah! That's it!”
Incredibad is out on CD/DVD on March 9 from Universal/Island
