The Lonely Island just dropped new music videos, as well as a Netflix poem. After numerous years working together in Los Angeles as the comedy trio The Lonely Island, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone found significant success on NBC’s long-running sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live.
While at SNL, The Lonely Island’s digital shorts gained considerable attention, particularly “Lazy Sunday,” which was written by the trio and starred Samberg alongside SNL cast member Chris Parnell. The short – part homage to cupcakes, part celebration of The Chronicles of Narnia – was an immediate hit, going viral and cementing Samberg’s reputation as one of SNL’s most entertaining cast members at the time. By 2010, all three Lonely Island members were focusing on following up the success of their 2009 debut album Incredibad, as well as a career in filmmaking. The trio’s most recent film, 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, while far from a financial success, continued the tradition of silly, irreverent comedy, for which The Lonely Island has long since become known.
It’s been a while since much else has been heard from The Lonely Island, but a new press release from Netflix has revealed that Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone are back once again, this time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Oakland Athletics’ 1989 championship season. To commemorate the event, the comedy trio has released two new music videos – “Oakland Nights” and “Uniform On” – both of which can be viewed below, as well as a 27-minute long musical poem on Netflix called “The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience,” which honors the Athletics, baseball, and The Bash Brothers.
For those who don’t know, The Bash Brothers was the nickname given to two of the Oakland Athletics’ most valuable players, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, who were both childhood heroes of The Lonely Island. In the years since the Athletics’ championship season, it was revealed that both Canseco and McGwire used performance-enhancing drugs throughout their careers. The new musical poem and the two new music videos deal with these issues in a way that only The Lonely Island can. In addition to the aforementioned new releases, a soundtrack album to the Netflix special is available for free to fans, and it includes and extra song and additional lyrics not heard in the visual component.
After almost 20 years of being widely known as The Lonely Island, the comedy group’s ability to focus on bizarre subjects and turn them into something humorous doesn’t seem to have dissipated in the least. “The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience” may not be the sort of humor that entertains everyone, but by this point, people know what they’re going to get with The Lonely Island. It’s that continued assurance of a unique brand of comedy that has maintained the group after all these years and will likely continue to do so for many more to come.
