‘SNL’ Writers Thought Kanye Was ‘Ripping Off’ Their Sketch When He Interrupted Taylor Swift
This week’s episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast found the former Saturday Night Live performers discussing the digital short “Iran So Far,” which involved Andy Samberg crooning about then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — with some help from Maroon 5’s Adam Levine and an Aphex Twin sample that the show reportedly didn’t secure the rights to before air time. “It cost NBC, I think, $160,000,” Jorma Taccone confessed during the podcast.
Much of their discussion was devoted to the episode’s guests: host LeBron James and musical guest Ye (“Kanye West” back then). While Meyers called LeBron a “full delight” and a “genuine, fantastic human being to spend time with,” everyone’s feelings around Kanye were a tad more complicated.
Akiva Schaffer recalled that he and Meyers wrote a sketch about Kanye being a “poor loser” at award shows and “speaking out on behalf of others.” Keep in mind, this episode aired in 2007, nearly two years before the incident that, in retrospect, one would assume this sketch was about.
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It all began with Kanye suggesting to the SNL writers: “I should make fun of award show stuff.” So the sketch was “just him interrupting different award shows that he would (have even) less chance of winning,” Meyers explained, “which culminated in him losing at a state fair for Best Pumpkin, and it was basically him walking on stage and saying, ‘I have the best pumpkin of all time.’ Like, ripping it out of a kid's hand.”
In the sketch, he also pops by the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards to torpedo Drake and Josh’s win, and interrupts the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
It may seem as though SNL had somehow predicted the future here, but while the 2009 Taylor Swift debacle may have overshadowed every prior incident, Kanye was already notorious for storming awards show stages at that point in time, thanks in big part to the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards, where he refused to concede a loss to French electronic duo Justice.
So when Kanye interrupted Swift at the MTV VMAs two years after parodying the exact same toxic behavior on SNL, the Lonely Island guys, who watched the whole thing transpire, naturally assumed it was a bit. “I remember thinking at the VMAs, live, ‘Oh this is so funny. But he’s kind of ripping off our bit,’” Schaffer admitted. “‘I wish he had called us to help work on this.’”
“Could have been better. Could have been funnier,” Taccone echoed.
Of course, it wasn’t actually a pre-scripted routine, just a guy being a huge asshole, so there was ultimately no need to worry about who would be credited.
Weirdly, the fallout from this fiasco also played out on Saturday Night Live, when Taylor Lautner, Swift’s boyfriend at the time, hosted in December 2009 and decapitated a Kanye effigy, which, according to Schaffer, is what led to Kanye including the line “fuck SNL and the whole cast” in his 2010 track “Power.”
Incidentally, the same album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also features a sample of “Avril 14th” — the same Aphex Twin song that the Lonely Island used (without permission) in that fateful episode.
“‘Blame Game’ is the exact same basic beat of ‘Iran So Far,’” Schaffer pointed out.
“I felt very proud of that,” Taccone added. “Granted it’s a very simple beat that’s mostly just using a sample, but I was like, ‘Oh, I think I influenced Kanye.’”
Which isn’t something you’d necessarily want to brag about these days.
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