Conan O’Brien and Andy Samberg Reflect on Being ‘Frustrated’ by ‘SNL’
There’s no denying that Lonely Island had an unforgettable run on Saturday Night Live. The shorts made the show more relevant with an increasingly online audience and were some of the early examples of a video going “viral.” The pre-taped bits also were obviously a departure from the “live” part of SNL. In talking about his Lonely Island legacy on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, both Andy Samberg and O’Brien spoke about one thing they both found frustrating with the SNL format, decades apart. O’Brien wrote for the show between 1988 and 1991, while Samberg was a cast member between 2005 and 2012. “When I was at SNL, I always thought short films were the way to go. And SNL had always done them a little bit, but I was always a little frustrated by live in some ways,” O’Brien said. “And I thought, ‘Why don’t we just get it?’ I mean, because all my heroes were Monty Python. It’s all this amazing sketch comedy that has been SCTV where they’ve got it just right.”Play“Yes, there had been short films on SNL, but when you guys started putting those out, it felt like you were doing the thing that I had been kind of daydreaming about in some weird way,” O’Brien continued.The fact that Samberg and the rest of the Lonely Island trio, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, were able to do it at all was pure luck of timing. There wasn’t a big financial investment at the start, nor even much interest, according to Samberg. “I just think about how lucky we were on so many fronts,” Samberg explained. “Like, it was right when YouTube was becoming a thing that people were talking about. It was right when digital video could be made affordably and look good. It also looked different from the live show. So it was a nice way to step out and be like, ‘Hey, this is our thing that looks different and feels different.’“They were like, ‘If you guys could do more of these for basically nothing — which is what we had been doing, and using the cast — we’re always looking for things to change over sets.’ It happened very fortuitously and kind of under the radar.” In other words, we may have never gotten “Dick in a Box” or “Lazy Sunday” — as well as Conan’s dream of more short films on SNL — if there hadn’t been a need to kill for time in between live sketches.
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