The Lonely Island's Incredibad Remains An Accidental, Perfect Ode To Middle-School Grossness

By Lia Johansen-Villanueva


Any time As soon as I lost my virginity, I sent the order chat a link to “I Just Had Sex,” The Lonely Island’s anthem to, well, just having had sex. We all did it, this order of young ladies announcing our own sexual encounters to each other through the the group’s (and Akon’s) more and more stupid ones (“But I cried the entire time?! / Doesn’t matter, had sex!”). The song appeared on The Lonely Island’s sophomore album, 2011’s Turtleneck & Chain, nevertheless by then, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone had thoroughly embedded themselves in our lexicon.


The three had been comedy shorthand between us since their first album, Incredibad, which turned 10 earlier this year. The world wide web has ensured that someone is always keeping track of such milestones. Yet to a specific corner of people — the ones that got to be in middle school and high school in 2009 — Incredibad’s tenth birthday means a fantastic deal. I know, because I’m one of them.


During the last few years, we’ve been asking ourselves (or, older, maler, whiter comedians have been asking themselves) what it means to be funny now, what we can and can’t mention, and who exactly gets to be in on the joke. People keep gesturing, vaguely, at a fundamental shift in what’s funny right now, as if comedy opened its doors to any sort of diversity and then we all cunningly locked the door in back of us. Although a decade later (or longer: the group’s game-changing “Lazy Sunday” digital short first aired on Saturday Night Live in in 2005), The Lonely Island’s first album still holds up. It’s why the group’s somehow first-ever tour, kicking off this week, is such a big deal.


Something about Incredibad lodged itself into our shared consciousness. It peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Rap Albums chart and was the No. 1 comedy album of the year. As their first single, “Lazy Sunday” transformed Samberg’s SNL career; the Lonely Island digital shorts became a mainstay of the weekly lineup. Soon, “Dick in a Box” won a Emmy, and “I’m on a Boat” was even nominated for a Grammy, though it lost to Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Rihanna.


The Lonely Island had YouTube to thank, as they’d uploaded their videos to the platform since the starting, nevertheless it was also because for whichever reason, they understood exactly what the world wide web would think was funny, way before being funny on the world wide web was the marketable skill it is currently. Today’s comedians-to-watch lists are mostly made up of people who began out being funny on Vine, or funny on Twitter, or funny on YouTube (or, for the savvy, funny on all three). Yet in 2009, there was just Incredibad, and because it made 12-year-olds laugh — 12-year-olds like me.


Being a 12-year-old girl in 2009 was different, I suspect, to being a 12-year-old girl today. Yet if the success of films like Eighth Grade and TV shows like Big Mouth has taught us anything, it’s that being 12 at any point in time has habitually been sort of the same: very gross, mortifyingly embarrassing, and certainly a catalogue of regrettable sartorial choices. Incredibad was an accidental ode to all of these things: Samberg’s hair used to look like hair on all of the men I had a crush on in middle school, “Lazy Sunday” captured the heightened drama of a preteen trip to the cinema, and “Jizz in My Pants” just made us laugh. It was gross, and immature, and there was a fancy in being invited to laugh at something without being laughed at.


Females and ladies are more regularly the aspiration of gross-out humor than they are in on the joke, which is probably why Louis C.K. Got to prepare jokes about wanting to masturbate in front of women for so long without anyone asking whether or not he actually did masturbate in front of females. To be funny in that sort of way was to lock ladies out, and to like that sort of humor, as a girl and as a woman, is often a series of mental gymnastics, of adopting a not-like-other-girls mentality, the unfortunate result of wanting to be one of the males. However on Incredibad, the joke was routinely resolutely on them, delivered in sincerely good hip-hop packaging.


What makes “Jizz in My Pants” and the rest of Incredibad still so good is that their silly premises, routinely escalating into insanity, are never delivered at the expense of the music or its production. “Last week I seen a film / As I recall it was a horror film” makes me laugh just thinking about it, and the song’s pitch-perfect ‘90s synth-rock delivery system is why. Half the escalation on the Julian Casablancas feature, “Boombox,” relies on Samberg’s more and more dumb pronunciation of “boiled goose.”


And on “I’m on a Boat,” we’re not laughing at T-Pain — we’re laughing at the absurdity of applying the braggadocios logic of early-aughts rap to three dudes on a boat that isn’t theirs. We’re laughing at the utter perfection of a sentence like “I’m on a boat and / It’s going fast and / I’ve got a nautical-themed pashmina afghan.” Comedian and wizard of the stupid song Demi Adejuyigbe, perhaps best-known for his fake end-credits raps, has mentioned, on multiple occasions, that Hot Rod is one of his preference movies (and honestly? Same.). You could hear it some days, as much in his ability to take a premise and drive it to its least-logical conclusion as in the clear and real fondness for the pop culture and musical stylings he targets.


At the same time, though, the jokes on Incredibad are knife-sharp satire. You’re laughing at “me toil part time at ja Cold Stone Creamery” before you’re struck by the deadly accurate takedown of white college males who become faux Rastafarians the initial time they smoke pot. I spoke to Val, who was 12 with me any time Once I discovered The Lonely Island, and she described them as “outlandish and outrageous” while approaching a “truth about life and the self.” The dick jokes are one thing, and they’re unsubtle, nevertheless like Val notified me, "The comedy often comes from the bits that are obscured by the ridiculous.” She’s right: “Jizz in My Pants” is foolish and absurd, nevertheless concealed indoor it is the line “I won’t apologize, that’s just absurd / Mainly your fault for the way that you dance,” a distillation of the way males can turn against the females they’re interested in once their advances go awry. Yet more than that, the thing that came up again and again any time While I spoke to females who have loved Incredibad for a decade, was how it was something that they shared with their friends.


Some days the comedic sensibilities of The Lonely Island are compared to an audience of teenage males building on an absurd premise to prepare themselves laugh harder and harder. Although we would sing these songs to each other in school cafeterias and make each other laugh, also, giggling at how rude we were finally allowed to be. It was something for us, something I can still text my companions out of context, guaranteed to prepare them laugh a city nation or perhaps continent away.


Any time Once I showed my 13-year-old brother the group’s criminally underwatched 2016 film, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, we were both reduced to a laughing heap on the floor (my dad was also laughing, yet he’s also dignified to be a heap). This summer, on The Lonely Island’s first tour ever, their audience will almost definitely be full of people who felt the same way we did in 2009. I wonder if they’ll know how much they mean to us.