Pop/Hip Hop/R&B
An Oral History Of SNL”s ‘Christmastime For The Jews’
Dec
That Other Sketch
While “Christmastime For The Jews” has a legacy that endures and always features in rotation around the holiday season, one can’t deny the cross-cultural impact of “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island. The pipeline linking SNL and late night (among countless other things) to the eager masses broke ground on December 17, 2005.
Jacobson: “Lazy Sunday” was funny in its own way. It wasn’t really what Smigel was trying to do. It was just kind of another color on Saturday Night Live that was good in its own way.
Smigel: Here’s the thing that’s so funny about it: Lorne was very excited for my cartoon and everybody was complimenting me after dress rehearsal. They were very happy with it. And all I kept telling people was, “Yeah, but that Chronicles Of Narnia thing…” I couldn’t remember that it was called “Lazy Sunday.” I told the boys — Akiva (Schaffer), (Andy) Samberg, and Jorma (Taccone) — that their sketch was unbelievable and that it was way better. I was just excited, because it was something the show desperately needed. I didn’t realize how much until they kept doing more of them. I mean, “Lazy Sunday” changed the show forever. It put YouTube on the map. It really did. Nobody had written about YouTube until those two things kind of exploded together that week.
Klausner: The idea that it would hit YouTube and then become viral was like, I don’t even know if that had occurred to me that that was a thing that things could do. But as bitter and jealous as I am as a human being I’m sure I found a way to be mad.
Brooks: It probably did [overshadow “Christmastime For The Jews”], to be honest with you. That’s probably what everybody was talking about the next week. Monday morning at the water cooler. Unless you were really keyed into the holiday thing, you probably weren’t talking too much about this one.
Scharff: It’s interesting because I think if TV Funhouse was happening now it would be getting jillions of views. The only place you could see TV Funhouse was if you watched Saturday Night Live. That was it.
Smigel: I mean, it’s just like any SNL sketch. They get views in the millions routinely so I assume that would be the case, certainly, with the funniest of the cartoons. But, I mean, I don’t feel any frustration about that at all. I really had frustration with the Triumph sketches because when I did Triumph at the Star Wars line, the reason that became such a well-known popular sketch was because of the web. This was before YouTube. There was something called iFilm, I believe. I think there were a couple of other websites at the time that were streaming, uploading things from television. For whatever reason, the Star Wars one was able to stay under the radar, even though it had millions of viewers over a few years. But then, in 2005, I believe, I went to Michael Jackson’s trial and harassed all the people who were there to support him. It was very compelling and very funny. It was running away with this iFilm website and then it was suddenly taken down.
Scharff: NBC, at that time, was not okay with digital media and they were… Robert and I, we couldn’t understand it. We would be psyched when [sketches] appeared online because then people could watch them again. The more people that could watch them the better.
Smigel: NBC couldn’t wrap their heads around it. All they saw was their intellectual property being utilized somewhere else and they weren’t getting a dime for it. So, they took it down. Then, six months later, the night “Christmastime For The Jews” happened, “Lazy Sunday” got picked up on YouTube and everything changed. Because it was such a phenomenon it got written up in the New York Times literally a day or two later. That whiff of positive publicity was the first ripple. That’s a giant, slow-moving corporate machine. They were like, “Yes, we should definitely do this. Now let’s put 300 lawyers on it and figure out how we’re going to do it.” 300 lawyers later, it happened. It probably took a year or two before it was a regular, integrated part of YouTube. As you see now, a lot of these shows just live for YouTube.
