syndicate project lonely island live stream

The song is far from their smartest – it's about jizzing in pants – but it received millions of views and went platinum, setting themselves up nicely for their crown jewel. But then came the juggernaut: 2008’s “ Jizz in My Pants”, the first single from their debut album Incredibad, which blasted the group into living rooms across the globe. “Lazy Sunday” and other 2005-2009 sketches and songs, like “Dick in a Box”, sent The Lonely Island and SNL Digital Shorts viral in a niche way. It went viral, and led to the trio getting more sketches on air, breathing fresh life into SNL and, according to NY Mag, “forcing NBC into the iPod age” – which, wow, feels like a lifetime ago. Their second short, “ Lazy Sunday”, subverts and mocks musical bragging in a video where Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about things like cupcakes, directions, and attending a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This absurd, slightly-stoned comedy is partly what makes The Lonely Island so good. Sure, on paper that might sound dry, but in true Lonely Island fashion the short ends up being a fake ad for lettuce, promoting the vegetable as something to get you 'through good times and bad'.

The first short is 2005’s “ Lettuce”, a two-minute video in which Andy Samberg and Will Forte sit on a stoop munching on entire heads of lettuce while Will comforts Andy about a bereavement. Though they were primarily responsible for a number of many now-viral videos like “I Just Had Sex” – songs loved by every backwards cap wearing frat-boy from California to Cambridge – it’s their other, earlier work that is the funniest. A few years later in 2005, and after pitching their own material independently, comedy giant Saturday Night Live took notice and brought them on board to lead a division called SNL Digital Shorts. In the early 2000's equivalent of your little brother's weird friend who is Huge on Snapchat, The Lonely Island started posting short films and absurd skits online in 2001. But with the group appearing for their first live concert at Clusterfest this June it’s perhaps time they get the recognition they deserve outside of comedy and cult circles – not for going viral every so often, but as consistent and important players in comedy, releasing work that stands alongside arguably more recognised comedic musicians like Weird Al and Rachel Bloom. Still, despite the co-signs from Gaga, audiences rarely turn out to actually pay for their work – perhaps because so much of it is released for free, perhaps because comedy often underperforms anyway, or perhaps because we just take them for granted. I mean, “I’m on a Boat” was nominated for an Grammy in 2010, and legitimate comedians, actors and musicians like Natalie Portman, Lady Gaga, and Michael Bolton have worked with and praised the trio.

They're creative polymaths – putting out music, TV, feature length films and viral videos that are consistently good. The trio, in which Samberg is joined by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, are best known as the people behind viral parodies like “I’m on a Boat” and “Dick in a Box” – the kind of videos you imagine university students watching while brushing Cheetos dust off their sweatpants –yet they’ve also been quietly reinventing comedy since they formed in 2001. That said, in a similar fashion to most of the work of The Lonely Island, the film went on to enjoy a cult afterlife.

Syndicate project lonely island live stream