Okay,

I really, really want to go into a long dissertation about the death of the ironic and sardonic in popular culture. I personally postulate that there is a distinctive link between the drop in our estimation of the ironic in our world and the acceptance of the current state of our country and our lives. But I don't have time for that. (Is that ironic?)

Instead, I'd like to ask for some help in explaining the mad phenom of the SNL Digital Short "Lazy Sunday." Don't get me wrong, please. I think it's funny. Really funny.

But let's take a minute to discuss the history of the clip, then we'll dissect.

The clip first aired mid-December. It's just a little ditty about Chris and Adam (Parnell and Samborg) getting riled up to go see a movie. If you haven't seen this yet, please go online and try to find it. iTunes has it for sale, but I'm hoping you have better things to do with your money...

So the thing aired, and since the history of the group behind it (Lonely Island) is used to distributing video for free, they slipped it on to YouTube and let the Internet denizens ch-ch-check it out. It spread like wildfirefox. At about 1.2 million views on YouTube, NBC asked them to take it off so they could get some revenue from the clip on iTunes. Fine.

But there's still something going on over at YouTube. If you search for "Lazy Sunday," you're gonna see almost 200 listings. None of them are the SNL sketch, but some of them are very well crafted parodies of said sketch. Most are crappy retreads... But the democratic nature of YouTube means that you'll get at-a-glance ideas of what ones are all right, and what ones deserve to be on YouSuck.com (note: YouSuck.com is not a real site at the time of this writing, and should it become one, we profess no affiliation...unless they want to pay us for it...)

Now, I like creative sparks. I give mad props to the Digital Short folks for inspiring such madness and devotion. But I'm just not sure it's deserved. And how weird to be in a place where we now all have effortless access to parodies of parodies that regular people made... It's hard to keep up...

Oh yeah, the point:
"Lazy Sunday" is funny. But is it funny enough to inspire parody and homage? I can tell you that I wasn't very inspired, and I'm a guy that's had major creative bursts from things like potholes and studying the Iran/Contra affair. To me, it's empty funny. Junk food funny. I'm not saying I expect SNL to take me over the top to genius. I've watched it enough to keep my love for the show at arm's-length. But is this clip some sort of a turning point? It won't be long (if it hasn't already been) that the clip will be seen more by people on the web than by people watching the broadcast.

I would be more understanding of the love for this short if it was strong on Irony (Capital, yo!) and less reliant on Non Sequiter to get its humor.

All Assail.