Seth Meyers and Lonely Island will always remember Steve Martin’s appearance as host of Saturday Night Live in 2006.
Meyers, 50, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer discussed the hilarious surfer skit they worked on for Martin on Monday’s episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, which aired April 29.
It’s a comedy that the Late Night with Seth Meyers host says he “thinks about all the time, mainly because he talks about it every time I see Steve Martin.”
He asked his co-hosts to explain the “Surf Meeting” skit, noting, “You wrote it.”
“For us, surfing competitions were a classic format where one person was bad and couldn’t take a hit over and over again, like far too often,” says Samberg, 45.
It showed “a group of surfers meeting on the beach,” he continued, recalling that he was in charge of the “surf crew.” “In an old-fashioned swimsuit that looks super goofy,” the sketch asks Martin’s character.
“It made us laugh so much when we wrote it,” Samberg said. “We thought, ‘This is the best thing ever.’ It actually went really well at the table and we said, “We did it!” » “We made a super funny skit for Steve Martin where he kills, and we can put it on the show.”
“The first time we rehearsed it without cameras, everyone laughed again and we said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the best,’ and then we just started rehearsing it and for some reason, it started to fade away,” says he.
Taccone, 47, suggested that the staging and multiple characters may have caused the problem, while Samberg noted that it may not have been intended for the performance. Martin tried to be “a lot crazier to save the sketch,” said Schaffer, 46, and Taccone agreed.
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“When morale plummeted due to the success of the skit, Steve fought hard,” Taccone recalls. “And I remember giving him the final commentary between the dress rehearsal and the aerial photography.” I also have more time. “It’s so good, and it won’t be good.”
Samberg said that after the show, Martin was “angry about it because he loved it and we all thought it would be a winner and had a good rhythm.”
Samberg noted, “Writing a surf meeting was one of the funniest moments of my entire time on SNL,” describing it as a “slumber party laugh” after discussing the “stupid names” that “all the surfers found each other with again.”