Lazy Sunday Wasn't Luck
Why the creators who build before anyone is watching always have an edge.
Hey, friends! I got a bit nostalgic writing today’s piece as I reflected upon an early viral video that you may remember. Let’s get into it.
Comedic Linchpin
In the video below, Conan O’Brien and Andy Samberg discuss the moment that the rap parody Lazy Sunday went viral on YouTube. To contextualize the moment, YouTube was founded in February of 2005, roughly 10 months before the SNL digital short.
For many, Lazy Sunday was their first exposure to YouTube itself.
In the interview, O’Brien calls Samberg the linchpin in comedy that bridged the pre- and post-internet comedy era, and on the surface, you might think how fortuitous it was for the video streaming platform to come along at just the right moment for that to happen. If you dive a little deeper, though, you discover there’s more to the story than that.
While YouTube is credited with making internet video go mainstream, in the early aughts, they were far from the only ones attempting to do so.
If you were there, you may recall services like Kazaa and LimeWire that leveraged peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols to distribute music, software, and video. You may also recall the need to install browser plugins of questionable origin to view video online, and if you were a technologically inclined comedy nerd like me, you may have also come across the website Channel101.org, which in those days hosted obscure comedy sketches from little-known comedy troupes like Samberg’s Lonely Island.
The comedy rap Stork Patrol, for example, was first distributed on Channel 101 in February of 2002—three years prior to YouTube’s founding.
If you listen to the song republished below, it’s easy to see the connection between the Lonely Island’s breakout hit and their lesser-known early days.
What stands out to me is that this isn’t a story about a comedy trio that found themselves in “just the right place and just the right time.” For three years, they produced work in relative obscurity, skirting traditional gatekeepers, doing comedy their way, and building an audience online independently by whatever means possible.
Their efforts eventually earned the attention of Lorne Michaels and led them to the hallowed halls of Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, where their brand of humor reached a much broader television audience. Simultaneously, YouTube emerged as the perfect platform for short-form comedy. This, of course, wasn’t something that they could have predicted. It gave Lazy Sunday a second life of sorts as it gained steam being passed around the internet.
The Lonely Island didn’t wait for YouTube to produce internet comedy. They made internet comedy for years before the right place for it even existed, and I think that offers a creative takeaway worth reflecting upon.
Takeaway: The future rarely rewards those who wait for the perfect platform, time, or place to come into existence. Instead, it rewards those who forge the path ahead. Eventually, the world catches up, and when that happens, those who’ve already been there reap the rewards.
One More Thing
One of my goals is to foster a greater sense of community with this newsletter. As such, I’d love to know what creative things you are up to and to feature them here.
Drop me a line via email or in the comments below to let me know what you have cooking. Can’t wait to hear about it.
Until next time,
—Mike