In an age of uninspired pop and fragmented audiences, the Lonely Island’s most significant accomplishment is not reviving the spirit of Allan Sherman but simply rallying people around music that also happens to be funny. In their best songs, the joke is never directed at a specific performer rather, it’s on them - these three white guys from the Bay Area, posturing like gangstas while rapping about cupcakes. “It was a ton of N.W.A., Beastie Boys, the Ice Cube solo records,” says Samberg, who at 32 is a year younger than his partners. Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone met in junior high school in Berkeley in the 1990s, where everyone listened to hip-hop. The group’s collaborations - they have performed with Akon, worked with the esteemed reggae producers Sly & Robbie and used beats by T-Minus, a producer for Nicki Minaj - also help smooth the racial politics of their music. (The auto-tuned refrain by a guest star, T-Pain, is, no joke, among his finest work.) The humorist Andy Borowitz compares the Lonely Island to the mock-metal band Spinal Tap, in that “the best Spinal Tap songs also work as lumbering heavy-metal songs.”
And if the boasts in “I’m on a Boat” are intentionally funny - has there ever been a better yachting-based taunt than “I got my swim trunks/And my flippy-floppies/I’m flipping burgers/You at Kinko’s, straight flipping copies”? - the song itself could pass as the best track in the Hot 97 rotation. A novelty hit like “Eat It” was really only funny if you were familiar with “Beat It,” but a song like “I’m on a Boat,” which features Samberg and Schaffer rapping aboard a yacht, lovingly spoofs every over-the-top hip-hop video. “We are so excited by the idea of songs being funny,” Taccone told me, “but it adds to the joke if they also sound good.” To that end, the Lonely Island’s songs aren’t punning parodies, but keen dissections of a genre’s cliches. They make novelty songs you can laugh at and also bob your head to.
The group, consisting of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, who are familiar from their “Digital Shorts” on “Saturday Night Live,” has not only revived the novelty song, but they’ve done the unthinkable: they’ve made it cool. This might help explain why the era of the novelty song seemed to end right around the time that hip-hop came of age: the greatness of Weird Al’s “Straight Outta Lynwood” notwithstanding, the average funny-song singer was not cut out to spoof N.W.A. Take a good hard look at the motherfucking boat (boat, yeah) Im on a boat motherfucker take a look at me.
The novelty song was an outlet for nerds, morning-show shock jocks and the kind of guys who put the word “weird” in front of their names. The group was originally formed in Berkeley, California - in 2001 - but they now reside in New York City. There were exceptions, of course, like the cerebral, political Tom Lehrer - but let’s just say that, in general, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin did not sing. The Lonely Island is a comedy rap group consisting of filmmakers Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Andy Samberg (aka The Dudes). Whether it was Allan Sherman making his 1963 hit “Hello Mudduh! Hello Fadduh!” or Weird Al Yankovic parodying Michael Jackson with “Eat It” in 1984, the comedian who made singalong spoofs was like the hip stand-up comic’s embarrassing country cousin. Remix of I'm on a Boat by The Lonely Island.The novelty song used to be popular, but it has never, ever been cool.
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