The Bizarro Buddy Comedy of Please Don't Destroy

How SNUs video sketches spoof the rituals of male bonding

- David Sims

The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It's a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic loss; after every emotional beat, each of them takes a bite out of a large head of lettuce. When the video was screened during SNL's live taping, the studio audience was clearly puzzled, the laughs barely rising above a polite chuckle. "Lettuce," created in December 2005 by Samberg's Lonely Island sketch group, could have been the end of SNL's experimentation with prerecorded digital sketches.

But then, two weeks later, came "Lazy Sunday," a music video in which Samberg and his SNL co-star Chris Parnell rap about "lame, sensitive stuff," as Samberg once put it: buying Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and going to a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. To this day, it feels like something furtively sneaked onto the air, a blast of youthful punchiness wedged in between SNL's often bloated bits of vaudeville. "Lazy Sunday" became a breakaway hit and ultimately helped demonstrate that SNL could still be a place where comedy felt fresh and strange rather than rote and reactive.

As Lonely Island's profile rose, its grainy videos turned into slick, celebrity-studded spectacles. Perhaps the pinnacle of the group's achievements was 2006's "Dick in a Box," in which Samberg parodied the songwriting and music-video conventions of '90s boy-band pop, recruiting a veteran of that moment, Justin Timberlake, to join in.

Wearing gift-wrapped packages on their crotches, Samberg and Timberlake deliver a pitch-perfect send-up of the baby-making ballads of acts like Color Me Badd and Backstreet Boys. The production is gleefully boneheaded and delightfully weird but not so weird that the show's core demographic would miss the joke.