Latest news with #TheLonelyIsland
Forbes
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Lonely Island Mounts A Surprise Comeback On The Charts
The Lonely Island's Turtleneck & Chain and Incredibad return to Billboard's Comedy Albums chart, ... More landing back-to-back at Nos. 9 and 10. BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 09: (L-R) Actors Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island perform onstage during the 2016 MTV Movie Awards at Warner Bros. Studios on April 9, 2016 in Burbank, California. MTV Movie Awards airs April 10, 2016 at 8pm ET/PT. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage for MTV) The Lonely Island was never supposed to become a bona fide music success story. The comedy trio first found an audience on Saturday Night Live, where the group's digital shorts turned sketch comedy into a viral phenomenon. What started as a series of quick-hit parodies soon evolved into a surprisingly fruitful musical career, complete with hit singles, bestselling albums, and even a big-screen soundtrack. This week, two of The Lonely Island's most popular projects reappear on Billboard's Comedy Albums chart — and they manage to do so at the same time, sitting right next to each other. Two Albums Return Side-by-Side On the latest edition of the Comedy Albums list, Turtleneck & Chain reenters at No. 9. Just behind it, Incredibad comes back at No. 10. It's not every week that an act sends a pair of different collections back to that ranking – or any Billboard roster – simultaneously, let alone in adjacent spots. Hundreds of Weeks on the Chart Turtleneck & Chain has now spent 226 weeks on the chart throughout its lifetime. Incredibad is more than a year behind, as it has thus far racked up 156 weeks on the tally. A Streak of Chart-Topping Success The Lonely Island has released three proper studio albums over the years — Incredibad, Turtleneck & Chain, and The Wack Album. All three climbed to No. 1 on the Comedy Albums chart. Beyond those core releases, the trio also issued a soundtrack for the feature film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, as well as a similar effort in The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience. Both of those titles also spent time at No. 1 on the Comedy Albums chart. The Only Act with Several Current Hits The Lonely Island is the only name on the Comedy Albums chart this week that manages to appear more than once. Last frame, that honor belonged to Monty Python, though at the moment, only Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail – yes, that's the full name – still lives on. At the moment, that set climbs a single spot to No. 6.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Seth Meyers recalls Billy Bob Thornton confronting 'SNL' lighting director: 'You got something to say?
Nobody, even SNL's lighting director, is going to tell Billy Bob Thornton where he can or can't wear a baseball cap. Seth Meyers recalls a face-off between longtime lighting director Phil Hymes and Thornton when Thornton hosted in 2001. Ultimately, Meyers said the two had a civil conversation after their initial from New York, it's a Billy Bob Thornton fight! On this week's episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast, Seth Meyers recalled a tense moment between the actor and longtime Saturday Night Live lighting director Phil Hymes. "Billy Bob Thornton was hosting and he was running his monologue wearing his baseball hat," Meyers recalled. "And Phil Hymes came up out on the floor and said to someone else, 'Somebody tell him to take his hat off.'" Apparently, Thornton overheard the remark and retorted, "Hey old man, if you've got something to say, say it to my face," according to Meyers. Andy Samberg, who cohosts the podcast, was well-known for his Thornton impression on the sketch show. So, he helped Meyers with his telling of the story by imitating the Oscar winner. Hymes served as lighting director on the show from Saturday Night Live's from the show's second season in 1976 until early 2018, spending nearly 42 years with the comedy hit. Meyers noted that Hymes, well-known as an irascible backstage figure, often liked to remind the cast that he'd once lit President John F. Kennedy in the White House. Meyers, who served as the show's head writer from 2006 to 2014, also took care to stress that the confrontation wasn't as public as it might sound. "Now I also want to clarify Billy Bob Thornton did not do this in front of everybody," Meyers added. "He walked off stage and he went and talked to Phil Hymes, real man to man. "I never saw Phil do this," Meyers continued. "Phil had a real 'I apologize' moment. There was a real like two decent men of honor [exchange]." Akiva Schaffer, another member of The Lonely Island, quipped, "Just two guys meeting at high noon, deciding not to fight," referencing the iconic Gary Cooper film High Noon. Whatever truce that Thornton and Hymes reached, it appears that Thornton got his way. Footage of Thornton's monologue from his time hosting the show on Nov. 17, 2001, makes it clear that Thornton did indeed wear a baseball cap during his monologue, in which he entertained questions from audience members imitating his Sling Blade appearance on season 27 of SNL remains his only outing on the show (not counting Samberg's impressions of him). Hymes was well-known for commenting on things he didn't like. He earned Lady Gaga's respect after commenting on her wardrobe and, in her words, "telling the truth," and he reportedly nearly caused Kanye West to walk off the show after a dispute about set pieces. Hymes won his first Emmy at the age of 95 in 2018. He died at the age of 96 in 2019. Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Seth Meyers is still laughing after 11 years: ‘We've taken advantage of bad things'
It's been 11 years since Seth Meyers took over as host of Late Night, and yet he's showing no signs of slowing down. "I can't believe I'm still doing this, but there's literally nothing else I'd rather be doing," he tells Gold Derby. More from GoldDerby 5 slots isn't enough: More limited series deserve a chance to compete with 'Adolescence' Laugh tracks: The state of the 2025 Emmy comedy race Close calls: The state of the 2025 Emmy drama race Of course, he's found more than a few other things to keep himself busier than ever, including a standup special, HBO's Dad Man Walking, two podcasts The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers and Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers, and a stand-up tour with John Oliver, among others. Not to mention filming his YouTube segments "A Closer Look," "Day Drinking," and "Corrections." Here, the SNL alum opens up about turning bad news into good comedy, getting a nickname from President Donald Trump, and the end of the late night wars. Gold Derby: So let's talk about . It's been 11 years — that's quite an accomplishment. How do you keep it fresh? Seth Meyers: One, we react to the news as it happens. And so ultimately, it feels almost like you're doing an improv show every day where you don't know what you're going to talk about until you get to work. And the other way we keep it fresh is we've just taken advantage of bad things to have a creative renaissance. We went through a pandemic, and if there was any silver lining, it's that we let our show change based on our time away. And one of the ways it changed it is you got a little bit more casual. I think we embrace the fact that we are the second late-night show on NBC, and we gave ourselves permission to act that way, and that was all sort of born out of the pandemic. How much can you respond to the news in real time? We give ourselves as much freedom as we can, but we never want to get caught responding to something too close to tape time if it doesn't allow us time to fully process our take. We don't want to mention something just to get points for having mentioned it. I think a lot of our audience watches us every day, and they have an understanding that if we don't get to a big story, it probably means we'll get to it tomorrow. Now, of course, the price of that is we are living in a time where sometimes the craziest thing to happen on Monday seems tame compared to the crazy thing that happens on Tuesday. We have no shortage of material, and that is both good and bad. You just booked George Clooney for the first time. Has he been on your wish list for a while? He has. It was really cool to see him on Broadway in Good Night, and Good Luck. In this day and age, you really do take note when you are blown away by seeing someone on stage. And this has been a very cool Broadway season for that. I was lucky enough to see Denzel [Washington] as well. That first time you see people you have seen on the screen your whole life and then actually see them physically perform, there's nothing quite like it. You just never regret going to see a Broadway show. So let's talk about "A Closer Look." Where did that segment come from? Very organically. I wrote a longer form thing, maybe in our first or second year, about the Greek debt crisis. And then I think we did one about Planned Parenthood maybe a month later, and we had no idea that we were building what would be the linchpin of our show. It's a really exciting piece to do. It's being written as close to real time as possible. And oftentimes we're talking about things that are upsetting. We have creative space where we taken silly tangents and do half-baked impressions. And we have callbacks to bits we did months ago, and it has become a very fertile place, both for information and for us. How much does that have to do with who's in the White House? A massive amount, I would say. The speed at which we are having to rush to add or even rush to tear up something that no longer is relevant based on the 180-degree turn that was just taken at a press conference, a hastily assembled signing ceremony. So whatever complaints anybody out there has about President Biden, I really, truly believe after 4:00, literally no news broke over the course of his entire administration. And that was very nice, at least for the people who write our cue cards. You got your own nickname, "Marble Mouth Meyers." Was that a badge of honor? I wouldn't say a badge of honor. I want to be fair — I think the guy has come up with some pretty good nicknames. I think "Marble Mouth Meyers" is maybe not his best. I challenge anybody to go back and listen to this interview in which I am talking faster than most people and I don't think I've stumbled once. It is a weird thing for him to have drilled down on. But you know, as far as my complaints about the man, that one is pretty low down the list. Given the political climate that we're in now, where networks are paying attention to what he's doing and vice versa, it feels like there's definitely a close conversation happening with the administration. Look, I think it's hard for networks right now. I would not want to be in the seat of anyone who's in charge of trying to run one of these things while you have an incredibly petty person who has the levers of power. So I don't want to say that I think it's easy to be in charge at a time like this, but I also want to give credit where credit's due and say that certainly the people that are in charge of our network have not given any extra edicts from on high as far as how they expect us to perform. So you never pull your punches. We don't pull our punches. And we also have no expectation that the audience we have spent so much time building up would have any interest in sticking around and watching our show if we started to. It feels like there's a lot of camaraderie in late night right now. It's lovely, especially as we go through these tumultuous times. We always had a great amount of affection and respect for one another. Strike Force Five, which was our writers' strike podcast, it was an incredible, like the long tail of that is how closer we are with one another. And it's really a cool thing to have. It's cool to see you as a guest on those shows, too. I've been lucky to have a long friendship with Jimmy Fallon and to be a guest on his show. To finally get to do [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel is so much fun, and if John Oliver had the courage to have guests on, I would love to do his show as well, but you know, he's chosen another path. And I do hope one day he finds success. The only thing I will say is, as a huge fan of the Bill Carter books, I do want to apologize to people who like the drama and the feuds. And I apologize for the fact that ultimately we are giving you a more boring era of late night in regards to squabbles. But I can only tell you it is very nice for us. While the formats for our shows in a wide shot look similar, any one of us can tell you how different they are from one another. And it's very rare that I feel as though we are stepping on each other's toes in regards to material or approach. What are the challenges you face as a late-night host these days? The challenge that I task myself with doing every day is writing a show. I think that there are obviously challenges in linear television and there are challenges in regards to things like advertising. But ultimately, I'm not the one who educated myself on how to solve those things. I'm very lucky to work in a network that has very smart people who are in charge of things like that, and so I just am going to write the show every day. And the challenge in that is the challenge that's always been there, which is you want to write to the height of your intelligence. You want to write quickly and you want to be able to, when the time comes, perform it with enthusiasm that makes it interesting to watch. So how much pressure do you feel to come up with new segments like "Corrections" or "Day Drinking"? All of our writers know that it's an open floor anytime they want to bring a new idea — you never know which one's going to be a hit, which one you're going to want to do again. But the fun part is trying and everything that has ever worked on our show has been born out of an authentic place. If it's "Jokes Seth Can't Tell," realizing they were writing jokes where their identity as the writer of the jokes was working against me being the guy who told those punchlines. So it's never that we sit down and say, what's the next big thing? It's more than somebody has a little idea that's based in truth, and then it gets its own momentum going. Where did "Corrections" then come from? "Corrections" came from the fact that people online who write comments in the YouTube section ultimately had a big problem with the fact that I said "Legos" instead of "Lego bricks." And so then I stepped out of the show once and recorded a short YouTube video where I tried to address this and then it became this snowball rolling downhill. And now every Thursday, I read every YouTube comment and we recorded a video called "Corrections," where I address all the mistakes I have been told by our viewers. The viewers who comment are known as jackals, and so I address the jackals and their impossible to please demeanors. And have you gotten corrections to your "Corrections"? Oh, yeah. Basically "Corrections" is a snake eating its own tail, which I can tell you is called ouroboros, which I learned from someone in the comment section. But it's certainly taking on a life of its own. It's not a giant number, but for the people who watch it every week, I think that they now feel very inside on the lore of the show and the characters who put it together. And so it's a very nice little community that we built, and in this day and age community is a pretty special thing. But it's also you being self-referential. I think that's what people are really responding to. The fun thing is I'm pretending to be insulted by their corrections, and they are pretending to be angry at my mistakes. But we all are aware that we're just kind of doing the show for one another. It's funny how special a thing it has become and how it makes me feel connected to our audience, which is a thing that I really didn't fully understand until the pandemic happened, and I was alone in a room doing a show into a screen, and then I realized, oh, most people are at home, many alone, watching this show on a screen. And so that closeness, which I only sort of fully appreciated then, is something that we tried really hard to keep, even now that we're back in the studio with a full audience. What's next for you? What's the one thing you haven't done that you want to conquer? I just want to get a good night's sleep. I feel really lucky. And it's an incredible luxury to have a show, especially in times like these where I feel like if I didn't have a show, I'd just be sort of muttering to myself as I walked up and down the street. So mostly I just want to hold on to what I have and appreciate that. I'm very happy that I come to work every day knowing how good I have it. It won't be a thing where I'll look back and say, oh, why wasn't I happier when I had my show? This was the happiest I think I've ever been. Best of GoldDerby Jay Duplass on exposing his 'dad bod' and playing a 'soft villain' in 'Dying for Sex': 'Easily one of my biggest acting challenges' Jon Hamm on 'Your Friends and Neighbors': 'None of us are perfect specimens' 'I'm very happy to be busy': O-T Fagbenle on his trio of Emmy-eligible performances Click here to read the full article.
USA Today
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Host of UFC personalities appear in new trailer for 'The Naked Gun' reboot
Host of UFC personalities appear in new trailer for 'The Naked Gun' reboot More than 30 years after the character last appeared on the big screen, a legendary cop returns in a few weeks – sort of. Lt. Frank Drebin is back in legacy sequel of "The Naked Gun," but it's as Frank Jr., played by Liam Neeson, and not Leslie Nielsen. The movie arrives in theaters Aug. 1 – and it will have a strong UFC presence, too. For a few quick frames in the new trailer for the film, Neeson can be seen punching out UFC announcer Bruce Buffer and longtime referee and former Bellator analyst John McCarthy while a broadcast team including UFC play-by-play voice Jon Anik and commentator Michael Bisping call the action. "The Naked Gun" will be the fourth film in the franchise. The original was released in 1988, starring Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, and was based on the 1980s police spoof TV series "Police Squad." Two sequels, "The Naked Gun 2 1/2" and "The Naked Gun 33 1/3," were released in 1991 and 1994. The new version stars Neeson as the son of Nielsen's Drebin; Pamela Anderson as his love interest; Paul Walter Houser as Drebin Sr.'s former partner's son; and even WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes. The film is directed by Akiva Schaffer of "Saturday Night Live" and The Lonely Island fame, and counts "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane among its production team. Check out the trailer above. What lands at No. 1 on our chart? The best (and worst!) MMA movies (and TV series) of all time
Express Tribune
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Trailer out now: Liam Neeson steps into detective Frank Drebin's shoes in The Naked Gun reboot
Paramount Pictures has dropped the trailer for its upcoming reboot of The Naked Gun, a fresh take on the classic 1988 comedy. The original film, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, was a parody of police and crime dramas and became a major box office success. The reboot is set to revive the franchise, which included sequels in 1991 and 1994. Liam Neeson steps into the iconic role of Frank Drebin, previously portrayed by the late Leslie Nielsen. Joining Neeson is Pamela Anderson, who takes over the role of the love interest, originally played by Priscilla Presley. Paul Walter Hauser plays Captain Ed, a role previously held by Alan North and George Kennedy. The star-studded cast also includes Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, and Liza Koshy. Anderson spoke highly of her co-star at the Zurich Film Festival last October, saying, "Liam is hysterical in it." Neeson reciprocated the praise, stating, 'With Pamela, first off, I'm madly in love with her. She's just terrific to work with.' He continued by emphasizing her humility and sense of humor on set, adding that she's 'going to be terrific in the film.' Neeson, known for his action roles, expressed initial hesitation about taking on a comedic character, admitting to Collider that he was nervous about playing Drebin for a full-length film after previous short comedic sketches. Directed by Akiva Schaffer from The Lonely Island, the reboot of The Naked Gun will hit theaters on August 1. Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins are producing, with Schaffer co-writing the script alongside Dan Gregor and Doug Mand.
