How The Lonely Island helped to foster contemporary meme culture
Even though they haven’t made a movie that hasn’t bombed tremendously at the box office, The Lonely Island have still conspired to cast a huge shadow over modern comedy, particularly on the internet and the unstoppable rise of meme culture.
Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone first met in high school and immediately hit it off, and because they’re well-known names in American comedy, it was inevitably Saturday Night Live that gave them the platform to take their signature style of madcap parodies and inspired skits to the masses.
As mentioned, though, cinematic success has been a hard thing to achieve. Hot Rod is a cult classic, Christopher Nolan adores MacGruber, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of the greatest modern mockumentaries, but none of them made any money. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was typically subversive and hilarious stuff, in fairness, but it was nonetheless restricted solely to streaming.
The best way to underline how The Lonely Island turned silliness into an art form is that the only major trophy they’ve earned as a collective came when they won an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics’ by writing ‘Dick in a Box’. That’s them in a nutshell; they take stupid ideas, ridiculous lyrics, and ludicrous videos, combine them together to form an earworm, and then sit back and watch as it infiltrates pop culture.
Thanks to a combination of shortened attention spans and social media, memes have become one of the easiest and most popular ways of delivering online humour. All it takes is an image and an associated quote, and viral success is often a heartbeat away. The Lonely Island embraced the idea of that before it became synonymous with the online age, with all of their best and most popular videos only lasting for a few minutes but gaining long-lasting life for being endlessly quotable and the kind of outrageous content people were desperate to show their friends from the very first time they’d seen it.
Maybe that’s why they haven’t been able to crack the movie business, then. Samberg’s biggest successes as a performer came on SNL and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but when he partnered up with his creative muses on a feature, nobody seemed that interested in buying a ticket. On the other hand, The Lonely Island name being slapped on a video virtually guarantees tens of millions of views, renditions at parties the world over, and countless thinly-veiled imitators.
It’s intended as a compliment, but The Lonely Island work best in short bursts. Meme culture has become increasingly self-aware, so it’s fitting that even their name is derived from the nickname for the apartment they all lived in together trying to catch a big break, which itself came from a one-act play Schaffer had written for the sole purpose of mocking Taccone. There are an insane number of layers and internet history required to understand many memes these days, but The Lonely Island were ahead of the curve from the very beginning.
For example, Sandberg and Will Forte starred in SNL‘s Lettuce, a surrealist skit where the pair had a conversation while eating heads of lettuce. It made little sense both in and out of context, but that served as the springboard to ‘Lazy Sunday’, a rap song about doing absolutely nothing. ‘Andy Popping Into Frame’ does exactly what it promises, ‘Dick in a Box’ and ‘Jizz in My Pants’ were entirely self-descriptive, ‘Just 2 Guyz’ skewered toxic masculinity, ‘I Just Had Sex’ mocks the fragilities of manhood, and the ‘Shy Ronnie’ bit focuses on a guy only being able to act tough when Rihanna isn’t around.
Again, this is meant in glowing terms, but The Lonely Island are basically living, breathing memes that poke fun at real societal issues in the most preposterous fashion, as well as dabbling in silliness for the sake of silliness. As online comedy continues to evolve and become more obtuse, existential, and difficult to comprehend for anybody who’s not on the exact same level, it’s becoming increasingly clear these guys were very far ahead of their time.
