December 27, 2005
Nerds in the Hood, Stars on the Web
By DAVE ITZKOFF
The New York Times
For most aspiring rappers, the fastest route to having material circulated around the World Wide Web is to produce a work that is radical, cutting-edge and, in a word, cool. But now a pair of "Saturday Night Live" performers turned unexpected hip-hop icons are discovering that Internet stardom may be more easily achieved by being as nerdy as possible.
In "Lazy Sunday," a music video that had its debut on the Dec. 17 broadcast of "SNL," two cast members, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, adopt the brash personas of head-bopping, hand-waving rappers. But as they make their way around Manhattan's West Village, they rhyme with conviction about subjects that are anything but hard-core: they boast about eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, searching for travel directions on MapQuest and achieving their ultimate goal of attending a matinee of the fantasy movie "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
It is their obliviousness to their total lack of menace - or maybe the ostentatious way they pay for convenience-store candy with $10 bills - that makes the video so funny, but it is the Internet that has made it a hit. Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, "Lazy Sunday" has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com.
"I've been recognized more times since the Saturday it aired than since I started on the show," said Mr. Samberg, 27, a featured player in his first season on "SNL." "It definitely felt like something changed overnight."
But Mr. Samberg is already well aware of the Internet's power to transform relative unknowns into superstars. In 2000, when he and his childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, both 28, who wrote "Lazy Sunday" with Mr. Samberg and Mr. Parnell, were still struggling comedy writers living together in Los Angeles, they created a Web site, the Lonely Island, to house their self-produced skits and video experiments.
"Honestly, almost every single one of the films was done at like 4 in the morning, kind of drunk," Mr. Taccone said. But the short movies they posted on thelonelyisland.com - everything from cartoons assembled from clips of old Nintendo video games to satirical rap videos performed in the styles of their favorite hip-hop artists - also gave the three a place to develop their comic voices without the pressure of having to deliver professionally polished work.
"The Internet allowed us to show people much faster, in a way that you don't embarrass yourself," Mr. Taccone said. "You don't have to hand someone a VHS. It's just on their computer."
These videos also provided the Lonely Island team with careers: through their Internet work, they landed an agent, pilot deals with Comedy Central and Fox, and writing jobs for the MTV Movie Awards. In 2005, they joined "SNL," Mr. Samberg as a performer and Mr. Taccone and Mr. Schaffer as writers.
At "SNL" they found a kind of kindred spirit in Mr. Parnell, who has used the program's "Weekend Update" segment to deliver highly inappropriate rap tributes to some of the show's comelier female guest hosts. "I don't think I ever heard from Britney Spears," said Mr. Parnell, 38, who has been with the show since 1998. "But Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Garner seemed to really enjoy it, and thankfully not be creeped out by it."
On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about "two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff," as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at "SNL," using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.
Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday's show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone's girlfriend's sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night - and morning - editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards. Finally, at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 17, the four learned from Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "SNL," that "Lazy Sunday" would be shown on that night's show.
By the next morning, the video had burrowed its way into the nation's cultural consciousness. "It brought a breath of fresh air to the show," Mr. Parnell said, adding that he received a congratulatory phone call soon after "Lazy Sunday" was shown from his co-star Maya Rudolph, who is on maternity leave, and her boyfriend, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. "It's something the likes of which we haven't seen on 'SNL' anytime recently."
Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone were also contacted by friends who heard the rap played on radio stations and in bars. And Mr. Samberg found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to his mother that the song's chorus is a play on words involving the name "Chronicles of Narnia" and the word chronic, a slang term for marijuana. "She's like, 'So is it actually about weed?' " Mr. Samberg said. "It makes you think it's going to be about weed, but then it's actually just about 'Narnia.' She's like, 'Oh, I think I get it.' "
While Mr. Parnell anticipates that the buzz surrounding "Lazy Sunday" will eventually die down, he said the video's success would continue to pay dividends for his young collaborators.
"It will have whatever life people are interested in it having, and then it'll pass out of being the thing of the moment," he said. "But it encourages Lorne and everybody involved with the show to trust them more, and to put their stuff out there."
Mr. Schaffer, who has written just two live sketches with Mr. Taccone that have survived the Darwinian "SNL" dress rehearsal process and made it onto the air, said he appreciated the attention "Lazy Sunday" has received. But he also said he expected no special treatment when the show's staff resumes work in January.
"The thing about 'SNL,' " Mr. Schaffer said, "is that all of this could happen, and we could still come in on Monday morning with zero ideas. No matter what, that's intimidating. We could use all the help we can get."
