Lonely Island And Saturday Night Live

As the group’s cult following grew, word of their shorts got to Saturday Night Live star Tina Fey and the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels. In mid-2005, the threesome flew to Manhattan for auditions with the most famous team in comedy. In short order, all of the Dudes were hired.

In December 2005, the Lonely Island crew did another one of their white-boy rap sendups on SNL. Riffing on the Chronicles of Narnia film, the sketch was, as expected, twisted, wrong, and very, very funny.

Now that the crew is on network TV, the skit went out as broadcast on a Saturday night, when it was watched by the usual (dwindling) audience, most of whom no doubt laughed and forgot about it.

But some people had recorded the show to their DVRs, and a few of them recognized a flash of brilliance in the Narnia skit.

So they uploaded the video to the Internet.

After it started to take off in the usual link frenzy, NBC heard the stampede and put the video on the official SNL site and even iTunes. Then, once again, the viral video effect kicked in—this time bigger than ever.

Jeff Jarvis, a media commentator, described the impact like this: “I haven’t heard anyone buzz about, recommend, or admit to watching SNL in, oh, a generation. But suddenly, I hear lots of buzz about the show. And it’s not because millions happened to start watching when the show happened to actually be funny again. No, the buzz is born because folks started distributing the Narnia bit, which indeed is funny, on the Internet, and people are linking to it. NBC is learning the power of the network that no one owns.”

And sure enough, links to the SNL site increased more than 200-fold in the two weeks after the video started circulating.

The Lonely Island tale has come full circle.

Misfits rejected by the entertainment industry go online and get popular. Entertainment industry wakes up to this phenomenon in the hard-to-reach demographic of influential twenty-somethings and hires the misfits.

The kids do the same thing on broadcast TV, but since that influential demographic doesn’t actually watch much TV, it isn’t until the skit goes back online (now amplified by the net-kids-make-it-big appeal) that the skit gets really popular.

Thus SNL, previously scorned by the online generation, suddenly gets cool again by tapping into the authentic underground spirit blossoming online. Once upon a time, the show used to handpick its talent pool from obscure regional theaters and improv troupes.

Now they also find it online.