Lazy Sunday (The Lonely Island song)

The track "Lazy Sunday" and its accompanying music video follow the two cast members (Parnell and Samberg), who adopt the brash personas of hardcore rappers. The song follows their quest to achieve their "ultimate goal" of attending a matinee of the fantasy film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The lyrics involve subjects that are "anything but hardcore," such as eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, searching for travel directions on MapQuest and buying tickets with $10 bills. Samberg described the lyrics as "two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff." Schaffer and Taccone had been on the writing staff for nearly three months, yet to this point only two live sketches of theirs had survived the dress rehearsal process to be broadcast. ==Recording and production==

. Parnell, Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone wrote "Lazy Sunday" on the evening of December 12, 2005. They recorded the following night in the office The Lonely Island occupied together using a laptop Taccone bought on Craigslist. While colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday's show, the group spent the morning of December 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera. The video used the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema. Comic Emily Heller, the sister of co-writer Taccone's girlfriend, plays a convenience store clerk. ==Release==

The short had its premiere on Saturday Night Live (season 31, episode 9) and received positive responses. "It played really well, and we were just super happy about that," said Samberg. Samberg reported that the video greatly increased his recognizability "overnight". "It captures a certain scrappiness about the show. There's an unpolished realness to it that I think people can instantly relate to," said Saturday Night Live veteran Amy Poehler. The success of "Lazy Sunday" encouraged Michaels to trust the troupe more and to encourage their material's presence in the show. Additionally, it was posted to several websites and shared via e-mail by fans. The unofficial uploads of the video went viral and were cumulatively watched more than five million times on YouTube. The clips were removed in February 2006, when NBC Universal asked the site to remove all copies, along with several other copyrighted NBC video clips. YouTube at that time was a startup website that appeared to be aimed for video creators, but by February 2006, due to "Lazy Sunday", established itself as a home for any type of video sharing. YouTube would later that year be purchased by Google for . NBC later placed the short on its website and partnered streaming platforms. In August 2013, the official Saturday Night Live YouTube channel uploaded "Lazy Sunday". Reception Entertainment Weekly placed the video on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "the hallowed genre of 'white dudes rapping about mundane stuff' reached new heights of hilarity with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell's 2005 ode to an afternoon viewing of The Chronic—what!—cles of Narnia." Business Insider included it on its list of "videos that changed YouTube forever." ==Sequel==

On May 19, 2012, Samberg and Parnell collaborated on "Lazy Sunday 2", which begins similarly to its predecessor and uses more modern references such as Siri, and seeing Sister Act on Broadway instead of Narnia. However, in the middle of the song, it changes genres to a darker dubstep mafioso rap song. Samberg used "Lazy Sunday 2" to bring a close to his time on SNL, with the final lines referring to how "Lazy Sunday" had been the opening chapter of his celebrity, and the sequel was how he would end his tenure on the TV show. ==Cultural influence==

"Lazy Sunday" is considered to have helped turn around Saturday Night Live declining performance prior to 2005. The video-hosting site had gone online five months earlier, in July 2005. including a West Coast response by actor Mark Feuerstein, an English response by comedian Sam Baron, an Australian response about lawn bowls, a song that defended the honor of the Midwest called "Lazy Muncie," and "Lazy Ramadi," a song by two US Army soldiers based in Ramadi, Iraq. In "The Merger", an episode of the television series The Office, Michael Scott makes an orientation film "Lazy Scranton" for employees who were transferred to Scranton. Starring Michael and Dwight, the video uses the same music, rap style, and camera effects used in the "Lazy Sunday" video. In the feature film Epic Movie, the character Captain Jack Swallows (a reference to Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise) breaks out in a rap called "Lazy Pirate Day"; the song is reminiscent of "Lazy Sunday" both visually and musically. Swallows is played by Darrell Hammond, a long-time performer on Saturday Night Live. ==See also==