Saturday Night Live

About

Saturday Night Live, often shortened to SNL, is an American television series that started in 1975. The show is well known for its comedic sketches and has been running for 35 seasons.

Some of their sketches, particularly digital shorts, have enjoyed widespread popularity among the internet community.

Pre-Digital Short memes

SNL spawned two notable memes that were not derived from a digital short. Unlike Digital Shorts, these memes do not produce many parodies of the original skit itself; the “More Cowbell” meme revolves around a catchphrase, while the “What is Love?” meme revolves around .gifs and YTMND’s.

• More Cowbell, (2000) is from a classic sketch featuring Christopher Walken. This meme is used as a catchphrase- one announces that a situation (video, song, image, etc.) “needs more cowbell.”
  

• The other meme is “What is Love?” (2005), derived from the then popular “Night at the Roxbury” skits during the 90s. This meme uses the song, What is Love? by Haddaway, originally released in 1993. This meme usually manifests itself in YTMND and in .gifs.
  

Digital Short memes

Digital Shorts are a series of sketches produced by The Lonely Island that usually parody music, and occasionally other bits of pop culture. The most popular of these skits almost always feature Andy Samberg.

Derivatives of Digital Shorts are usually parodies of the original sketch.

• Lazy Sunday (2005) was only the first digital skit to use The Lonely Island’s music, but it became extremely popular on the internet. The video is also infamous for its removal from Youtube by NBC. Before it was taken down, one copy of the video had been watched more than 5 million times and was arguably a major factor in increasing Youtube’s popularity.
  

• D*ck in a Box (2006) was one of the most viewed videos on youtube (like Lazy Sunday), before being taken down by NBC. However, the video was re-uploaded under the huluDotCom channel; this version currently has more than 21 million views.

• “The Shooting” (2007), more popularly known as “Dear Sister,” was a parody of The OC’s overly dramatic second season finale. This video started off inauspiciously, coinciding with the Virginia Tech Shootings. As a result, NBC never uploaded it to Youtube and removed copies of the short. Despite this, the video became popular enough to result in many parodies. The original video and subsequent parodies of it feature the song, Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, originally released in 2005. It is well known for its attention grabbing, “Mmmm Whatcha Say” line.
  
  
  

  Other Possible memes:

  These music videos promoted The Lonely Island’s debut album, Incredibad:

  • Like A Boss (feat. Seth Rogan):
    

  • I’m On A Boat (feat. T-Pain):
    

  • Jizz In My Pants