Seth Meyers and the Lonely Island recall botched “SNL” sketch: The 'failure that still sticks with Steve Martin’

“I felt like I was aiding and abetting a crime against a comedy legend,” Meyers said.

Seth Meyers and the Lonely Island left an impact on Steve Martin when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 2006 — but not the positive one that they’d hoped for.

In Monday’s episode of The Lonely Island Seth Meyers Podcast, Meyers, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone discussed their contributions to a failed SNL sketch that still haunts the Only Murders in the Building star to this day.

Samberg recalls the sketch, which saw Martin play an out-of-touch older surfer who’s ejected from a group of younger surfers, playing flawlessly early in the creative process. “It was making us laugh so hard when we were writing it,” he said. “We were like, ‘This is the best thing ever.’ It actually played great at the table and we were like, ‘We did it! We cracked a super funny sketch for Steve Martin where he kills and we get to like have it be on the show!’

He said the sketch remained funny in early rehearsals, until the magic started to fade. “When we rehearsed it the first time without cameras, everyone laughed again, and we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it's the best,’ and then we just started rehearsing it, and for whatever reason, it started tailing off.”

Taccone suggested that the physical staging of the sketch may have caused some of the issues. “It was like the blocking was wrong,” he said. “But the show is like, if you don't fix it right then, then that's your blocking and you're f---ed, and that's what it felt like was happening.”

Samberg also noted that the humor of the sketch might have been lost in translating it to the stage. “A sketch can be really funny as a radio play and as written and with you sitting at the table read reading it, and then when you actually act it out there's something about it that just doesn't translate to a live sketch,” he said.

Schaffer said that Martin continually tried to fix the sketch. “I saw Steve Martin correctly going, ‘Oh, s---, this one's not going to work. What else can I add on top?’ So he changed the way he did it to be way goofier to try to save the sketch.”

Taccone agreed. “As morale plummeted in the success of the sketch, Steve fought so f---ing hard,” he said. “And I actually remember like in between dress [rehearsal] and air going in to give him last notes on it very disheartened, and just being like, ‘I wish we had more time’ and he was like, ‘I wish we did too. It's so good, and it's not gonna be good.’”

Samberg said that Martin was puzzled by the sketch’s failure after the conclusion of the episode. “I do remember him after the show being like, ‘What happened?’” he said. “He was distraught about it, because he liked it, and we all thought it was going to be a winner and it had a great rhythm to it.”

Meyers, who performed a small part in the sketch, said that he felt guilty about the sketch’s lack of success. “I felt like I was aiding and abetting a crime against a comedy legend,” he said. “We were all in our cool ass wet suits and this legend was in a dumbass 1920 swimsuit. He was the only guy who was even supposed to get a laugh in it you know what I mean? None of us had lines to get laughs. So it was basically the younger generation doing none of the work and just watching one of the great comedy magicians of all time not be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat because we gave him a hat with no rabbit.”

Meyers also said that Martin frequently brings up the sketch in their interactions. “I feel like Steve to this day has a bone to pick with Lorne [Michaels] but knowing Lorne, he thought this was a great sketch because it was the young generation with Steve he loved the way it looked,” he said. “And Steve was definitely, in his telling of it, fighting for a sketch called ‘Bank Loan’ where he and Amy Poehler were clearly alcoholics who just wanted money to go get more drinks and they were drunkenly trying to get a bank loan from [Chris] Parnell and Steve had a far better time in his regular clothes sitting next to Amy Poehler than he did standing in an old-timey bathing suit with a bunch of dudes.”

“But the great thing, and why surf meeting endures for me, is that for all his successes, it is a failure that still sticks with Steve Martin,” Meyers concluded.

Listen to the full episode of The Lonely Island Seth Meyers Podcast above.

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