It is, at the same time, the most optimistic, encouraging entertainment story of 2005, and
the stupidest. But not "stupid" as in "Carrot Top is stupid."
Nobody could blame you for not watching Saturday Night Live on December 17, but I did.
I tend to watch SNL if I'm home. Jack Black was hosting and Neil Young was the musical
guest. Such a killer promise of a one-two punch is usually a fantastic prelude to inevitable
comedic disappointment, and most of SNL on December 17 was just that.
I don't remember what time it was, but an "SNL Digital Short" came on. There's been only one
other "SNL Digital Short" that I've seen, which was a bit featuring one guy consoling another
guy about a failed relationship. There were no jokes in the dialogue; the single gag in the
piece was that both men were snacking on heads of iceberg lettuce. It got old quickly, but I
suppose the avant-gardy spice of the segment displayed some faint promise.
December 17's digital short was unceremoniously titled "Lazy Sunday." The skit featured Andy
Samberg, an SNL "featured player," and longtime cast member Chris Parnell, who for
some reason always I always considered a walking, human form of poultry.
Presumably you have been on the internet for at least fifteen minutes over the past ten days,
so please bear with the repetition of this description for those three or four who haven't
heard it yet, or skip the next paragraph:
The premise of "Lazy Sunday" was a video for a tag-team rap song, much in the style of old-
school Run-DMC with early gangsta beats. The lyrics are about two caucasian men on a mission
to see The Chronicles of Narnia on a Sunday afternoon. On their way to the theater,
they stop to get cupcakes. They then consult an internet mapping service to find the best way
to the Upper West Side where their show is playing. They stop at a deli to obtain snacks for
the show, since movie concessions are overpriced. Inside the theater they watch one of those
pre-feature entertainment reels (like "The Twenty") and answer its trivia questions. The song
ends as the film is about to begin.
I watched this segment with passive amusement on TV. It reminded me of the old days of
Saturday Night Live, the late 70s, when I could tell something amusing was going on
but was too young to understand it yet. The sound was low so I couldn't hear all the lyrics
to the song, but they kept throwing up graphic cues, most notably the Chronicles of
Narnia logo, shots of some DVD covers, graphic scream-messages like "Cupcakes!" and
"Snack Attack!," over shots of two hopeless caucasians stalking the streets of Manhattan and
stopping in stores.
At the very least the energy level was more pulsating than, say, two
morose guys eating lettuce, and I got hooked by the style. I was hoping to find it again on
the internet the next week, and I did by Googling "Chronicles of Narnia," "Samberg" and
"Saturday Night Live." I showed it to Kate on the laptop.
I'll pause my personal relationship to this story there, since the cultural boom of this
nearly-throwaway little segment on Saturday Night Live has gotten -- well, just
downright stupid crazy in the 12 days since its airing on SNL.
Andy Samberg, a bushy-haired -- okay, it's so obvious I might as well say it -- Jewish
kid with the widest mouth in showbiz, is the first SNL performer whose rise
through the ranks of comedy was pretty much due to web-based entertainment. He and his
partners at thelonelyisland.com made
short films -- often late in the morning while drunk -- that caught the attention of people
like Viacom, whose Comedy Central and MTV concerns hired the team to do comedy writing.
SNL called in '05. Lorne Michaels hired Samberg primarily to perform; his partners
were hired to write. It's assumed their ingestion into the famed SNL writing cabal was
much like almost all other freshman writers in the show's history; i.e., a lot of striving to
prove themselves amidst a first season of agonizing waiting. Sandberg's most notable moment
so far was in the lettuce film. I liked his "vibe," which is something I've said about only
one other person in the history of time (a dude), but had to reserve judgement until I'd seen
him in something else.
Chris Parnell -- who's my age, 38 -- is perhaps best known on SNL as "Merv the Perv,"
a social catastrophe who speaks almost entirely in unappetizing sex jokes. Parnell's also
known for doing occasional raps on "Weekend Update" about attractive females who happened to
be hosting the show; personally I haven't seen any of those, so I had no idea he could
actually rap.
Samberg and Parnell hooked up at some point the week before the December 17 show, and with the
other SNL hires from lonelyisland they wrote and recorded the "Lazy Sunday" rap. They filmed
the entire two-and-a-half minute video on the Thursday morning before airtime at borrowed
locations around New York. In fact, from what I understand, a lot of the equipment
they used was borrowed. The video was edited on laptops and presented to Lorne Michaels at
some point towards the end of the week.
Michaels reportedly decided at 11pm, a half hour before SNL's live broadcast, that
"Lazy Sunday" would make the show. Customarily, when a piece of showbiz mythology comes with such
a casual beginning, it involves a blonde sipping soda at Schwab's in Hollywood.
The web-clip service youtube.com started showing a choppy capture of "Lazy Sunday" after
several requests. For web-savants, it became a must-see video. ITunes and NBC.com have offered it as a free download.
On December 19, at the "Narnia Fans" website, contributor and apparent profanity-screener
Paul Martin (not the embattled Canadian prime minister, I don't think) posted this:
SNL's Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg created a music video for The Chronicles
of Narnia. It's a rap, based on a couple of friends going to see the film. It's a very
funny video, and really relatively clean. There's one instance of cursing, but it's bleeped
out.
Martin then provides a transcription of the lyrics. There's one instance of cursing, but it's
bleeped out.
On December 23, for a lark, I looked up "Lazy Sunday" on Wikipedia.org to see if there it was
mentioned in any articles. The video already had its own entry. ("The
film, set in New York City, shows Parnell and Samberg performing a rap about buying cupcakes
and going to see the movie The Chronicles of Narnia.") It hadn't been a full week
since its first airing.
True, true, as we all know, many things have been given instant encyclopedic weight thanks to
Wikipedia's controversially spontaneous editing policy. But a Saturday Night Live
skit? Five days after its first showing anywhere?
That might be enough to cause a chuckle, but the "Lazy Sunday" buzz, amazingly,
continued to build, even through the Christmas holiday frenzy. Village Voice had
analyzed it in their December 21 Status Ain't Hood column, which is understandable since that's
technically a New York-based weekly with an incidental readership outside the five
boroughs.
No, things started to get really weird for "Lazy Sunday" when the New York
Times gave it a 1,000-word article on December 26. That's approximately 25% more words
than my Olympian article on the Dwarves (before the paper edited out half of
Blag Dahlia's quotes for family reading).
The groundswell simply will not stop swelling. Josh Levin of Slate.com chimed in,
employing the most outrageous subheadline in entertainment journalism history: "It won't save
Saturday Night Live, but it could save hip-hop":
"The whole presentation -- the lyrics, the flow, and the aesthetic -- owes more to New York
rappers from the '80s than to anything that's getting made today. The way they trade rhymes
and enunciate the end of each line... recalls the delivery of 1980s artists like Run-DMC. The
production values, New York street scenes, and silly similes call to mind early Beastie Boys
tracks... It's hard to think of a Top 40 hip-hop track that's similarly playful. Eminem's
subgenre of silly songs ("The Real Slim Shady," "Ass Like That") all feel calculated -- the
references to MTV ensure that his videos get a ton of airplay on MTV...
"People aren't forwarding this video because it's a parody of what's bad about rap; they're
sending it around because it's an ode to what can be great about it. Instead of auguring a
new day for SNL, maybe it points up what's missing in mainstream rap -- an awareness that
it's OK to be goofy."
I almost lost it when the a Midwest end-of-the-year pop poll -- written up, I think, by
someone from Des Moines -- named "Lazy Sunday" the "Best Music Video of 2005." I felt myself losing it when I found a website selling T-shirts based on lyrics from the video. I did
lose it when NPR -- who, bless their little hearts, seem to perpetually have their fingers on
the pulse of entertainment trends that peaked six weeks ago -- devoted a four-minute segment
to "Lazy Sunday," and why it's important. ("The fact that they're white rappers isn't used as
a crutch!" or something like that.)
In less than two weeks "Lazy Sunday" has become the Citizen Kane of the web, or at the very least its Kiss Alive. It has been downloaded 1.2 million times. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot to you in the information giga-age, but remember this is an SNL skit we're talking about. One from this decade, not the 1970's.
"Lazy Sunday's" status as a cultural touchstone to be debated and analyzed has taken less than two weeks to develop. Not just less than two weeks since its broadcast. Less than two weeks after its creation. As I write this it has been less than two weeks since Samberg and Parnell were filmed gnawing on cupcakes outside the Magnolia Bakery.
From the relatively obscene amount of notice this thing has gotten you'd think Saturday Night Live had just uncorked the American equivalent of Monty Python's "Funniest Joke Ever Written," something so devastating in its greatness. In the last ten years of SNL, the only sketch at whose mention people will nod appreciatingly is Christopher Walken's "More Cowbell" skit. To compare "Lazy Sunday" to "More Cowbell" is just unfair, unreasonable and inaccurate.
It would be totally wrong. "Lazy Sunday" is way, way, way funnier than "More Cowbell."
In fact, I think it's the best thing to appear on SNL in at least the last fifteen years. The last SNL skit that obsessed me this much was when Eddie Murphy impersonated Stevie Wonder in front of Stevie Wonder, who admittedly was not looking.
So, here's where my personal relationship to "Lazy Sunday" comes back in.
I was going to do an end-of-the-year "Top 10 Entertainment Things" column, just because it seemed like something I should do. My draft list included things like Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Batman Begins, some book Dave Eggars edited, the Stooges concert, the four 2005 albums by senior citizens that were actually really good (Neil Diamond, McCartney, the Stones, and John Cale if you must know). I changed the rankings around quite a bit, except for "Lazy Sunday." There was no way it would rank any lower than No. 1.
I didn't just find "Lazy Sunday" again on the web and show it to Kate, I watched it a few more times again myself. I'd say, oh, maybe 20 more times? Conservatively?
While I do not understand the passion that drove that woman in England to play Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" at blaring volume hundreds of times in a row, I at least now understand the physical compulsion.
I brought up "Lazy Sunday" in conversation. I forwarded the video to a lot of people. I've posted links to it twice on Satanosphere already. Most tellingly, discussions about "Lazy Sunday" have actually broken the awkward conversational ice between myself and my co-workers (although the brownies I brought last week probably helped that too).
It's the kind of skit that inspires perverse pride in that I saw it when it was first on TV. I mean, I saw tapes of the Berlin Wall coming down, well after it happened, and I don't care. Chances are you're not as obsessed as I am over "Lazy Sunday," so let me briefly outline what makes this TV moment so special, and what it might lead to.
Saturday Night Live, as you might expect, is overall in one of its more fallow years. We're all aware that SNL has often gone through cycles of quality. There was a lot of buzz over the Will Farrell/Molly Shannon/Jimmy Fallon era, which I didn't watch much of; since Fallon left the show's sort of been toothless. A lot of this season has lacked a sense of killer humor instinct. Even Jack Black seemed tired on December 17; his first sketch was about eating in a restaurant and getting blown away by the wind everytime the front door opens. Not exactly a thigh-slapper.
"Lazy Sunday" was an unexpected jolt of one great comic fragment after another, compactly served, relentlessly paced. The dude from NPR was, I kinda hate to say it, right: It wasn't funny just because two white guys were lampooning rap music. In fact they weren't lampooning rap music at all -- they both were actually really good MCs.
What "Lazy Sunday" parodies is the caricature of hip-hop, its reliance on manufactured menace, and the public's weariness of that artifice. Hip-hop can be great, but its representatives can be a little clueless as to how dopey the "threatening" pose looks. Even Eminem's latest aspirations to lunacy carry this "I'm gonna git you sucka" tone to them (and Encore, let's face it, just sucked). OutKast and Nelly at least seem interested in giving hip-hop a new shot of depth and fun respectively, but how long are we supposed to cower in fear at the feet of Trick Daddy?
Samberg and Parnell rap aggressively, nearly gangsta-style, about cupcakes, The Notebook and whether MapQuest is better than Google Maps, and in doing so unravel the wack drama of rappers that, before today, I might've thought were pretty good.
When was the last time an SNL skit produced anything resembling such social import, and be funny as hell at the same time? The only such weighty moments I can remember on SNL were both from the 70s': The Richard Pryor/Chevy Chase "Word Association" skit, and the film of John Belushi in the future, visiting the graves of cast members who died before him. And that was only effective in retrospect, after Belushi became the first to die.
There are other things about "Lazy Sunday" that could be ticklishly foretelling, besides the near certainty that Samberg will be groomed as the next big SNL breakout star. It also means something to the development of web-based comedy, a realm whose lifetime highlight up till now has involved annoying variations on a dancing peanut. A lot of moving web humor has to get over its scatalogical bent (yawn), and even some widely-distributed animated web moments are stupefyingly awful (ESPN's Sports Guy, anyone? Didn't think so). People like lonelyisland.com -- not to mention channel101's House of Cosbys -- have used the internet's immediate gratification to their advantage. You can splice something that's happening immediately, within the most recent of contexts, with fast-cheap-out-of-control aesthetics, and find a pretty devoted audience. It wasn't certain if that aesthetic could translate itself from the relatively hip, insular cyber world to a larger mainstream audience. "Lazy Sunday" proves that it could, given that likeable talents like Samberg crop up amongst the imitators.
Another great thing about the video is that it doesn't really make disparaging fun of anything -- not cupcakes, not Google Maps, not stocking your backpack with Mr. Pibb, or even Narnia. It just observes an absurd clash of faux attitude and cultures. One could argue that it's an enthusiastic embrace of all that makes Samberg and Parnell such incurable nerds; the first known fusion of geek and testosterone. I like that "Lazy Sunday" might validate a whole demographic of dice-throwing fantasy dweebs and sugar junkies, even though I will continue to poke fun at them.
I'm not kidding. I'm kind of scaring myself, how much I'm not kidding. Everybody's going to get a piece of "Lazy Sunday's" action. Certainly, the Magnolia Bakery (401 Bleecker St, Greenwich Village) is poised to become the Starbucks of cupcakes, and Mr. Pibb might finally gain ground on Dr. Pepper.
Or, possibly, this whole thing might just blow over next week, and Samberg, Parnell and "Lazy Sunday" will be remembered only as much as SNL alums Gary Krueger and Terry Sweeney (who?). I dunno, though, this feels a bit different. The sheerly giddy quality of the "Lazy Sunday" craze, and how quickly and dumbly it's mushroomed and been pored over, is unlike any other three minutes in color TV history.
It's a dreamworld of magic, that's what it is.
