Jul.16.2007 Andy Samberg may be less adorable than you think
SNL’s Andy Samberg, singlehandedly responsible for bringing back the joyous act of men inserting their genitals into boxes, has a new movie called Hot Rod coming out in a couple weeks. So what better way to celebrate that than have a New York magazine piece that makes you look like a one-trick pony and basically intimates that the movie will fail and that you’re already feeling like a tortured genius?
Andy Samberg is not that kind of person. He’s more likely to string together words like super, lame, and balls, as when he describes to me a comedy video he made in junior high. “It was about one-armed boxers,” he says, then laughs. “Man, it was super-lame balls.”
You know what else is apparently super-lame balls? Recording interstitial promos. Because when the director lobs an easy question from off-camera like, “Tell me the plot of your movie,” Samberg replies, “Hot Rod is about a sex offender.” (It’s not.) “He does stunts to raise money to sex-offend.” (He does not.) Then he, Taccone, and Hader crack a few jokes about how lame the movies are during Comedy Central marathons. (“Stay tuned for Teen Wolf Too!”) A lot of this is the usual comedian joshing—Hader keeps doing an entirely counterproductive bit about how, on the day Hot Rod opens, you should go out and see Transformers for the seventh time—but the implied joke in each of Samberg’s responses is, Hey, America! Can you believe they’re making me do this marketing bullshit?
Hot Rod might not be the movie Samberg and Schaffer would ideally make, but the hope is that if it’s a hit, it will give them the chance to make their ideal movie. “The studio knew that if they put someone in an Evel Knievel costume, whether it’s Will Ferrell or Dane Cook or Andy Samberg, then they’ve got a poster,” says Schaffer. “And they wanted a PG-13 movie, like a Dodgeball. I think within those confines, we did pretty well.”
It goes on a bit. An interesting study into a guy I like a lot but who seems to be buying the hype a bit too much maybe. Make no mistake, I find Samberg to be the main highlight of the past couple seasons of SNL, but absurd humor appeals to my demographics, not the broader audience that will need to see his movies to make him successful. So even if he gets half of the people who like his antics to go, we’re talking about one small share of the overall marketplace.
On the plus side though, we learn that Andy is perhaps functionally retarded.
Earlier, Samberg had watched Dunston Checks In, a comedy that stars Jason Alexander and an orangutan. His enjoyment of it, he insists, was not ironic in any way. And, later, when a Dunston Checks In commercial comes on, Samberg lets out what I can testify to being an unqualified squeal of joy.
Let us salute this special man by going to see his retard opus. If only he were only playing a retard, then we’d be looking at Academy Award-winning actor Andy Samberg.
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