The Last Time Jack Black Hosted ‘SNL’ the Show Changed Forever
Jack Black is set to host Saturday Night Live this weekend for the first time in nearly 20 years, and his fourth time overall. Tenacious D also served as the show’s musical guest in a 2006 episode, but presumably that won’t count toward a Five-Timers Club jacket.
Black’s last hosting effort was pretty solid. Memorably, he kicked off the show by belting out his unused tie-in song for Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which eventually devolved into a series of musical confessions about how he can’t actually read and once peed in Jackson’s coffee pot during the production.
This particular episode also happened to feature one of the most significant moments in SNL’s history.
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Sandwiched between a sketch about TV news anchors and a performance from musical guest Neil Young came the second-ever SNL Digital Short: “Lazy Sunday,” which found Chris Parnell and new cast member Andy Samberg rapping about their plans to see the new Chronicles of Narnia movie.
“Lazy Sunday” became SNL’s first viral video, exploding on the newly-launched YouTube, and forcing the show to fundamentally re-evaluate its approach to comedy. After “Lazy Sunday,” SNL began cranking out more and more pre-taped, internet-friendly sketches that could play to an online audience of young fans long after the live show ended.
While Black didn’t appear in “Lazy Sunday,” he was already aware of the Lonely Island guys, since they were both regulars at Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab’s Channel 101 screening series. In fact, Black appeared briefly at the beginning of the group’s Fox pilot Awesometown, playing the role of George Washington.
Black’s 2005 SNL outing also included a sketch that was pulled directly from the Awesometown pilot: a parody of the 1985 sci-fi movie Enemy Mine, which was about a human and an alien who are stranded on a remote planet. But in the sketch, “Glirk” reveals that he has “both male and female genitalia.”
Black actually felt bad about taking Jorma Taccone’s role, but Samberg and company were desperate for material because they were already “completely out of ideas.”
They were able to get this bizarre sketch on the air in large part thanks to Black’s offbeat comedic taste. “If you had a piece you loved that maybe hadn't worked with previous hosts, but it was a comedy lover’s delight, your final Hail Mary would be, ‘Let’s throw it into the Jack Black show,’” Seth Meyers once explained.
Of course, this was a long time ago, back before Black was making millions of dollars by starring opposite candy-colored CGI pigs. So don’t hold your breath for any groundbreaking music videos or perverted alien sketches on this Saturday’s episode.
