I haven’t heard anyone buzz about, recommend, or admit to watching SNL in, oh, a generation. But suddenly, I hear lots of buzz about the show. And it’s not because millions happened to start watching when the show happened to actually be fnny again. No, the buzz is born because folks started distributing a Narnia bit, which indeed is funny, on the internet… and people are linking to it (that’s a Technorati chart to the right)… and NBC was smart enough to distribute it, free, on iTunes. NBC is learning the power of the network that no one owns.
Cowbell came long before Narnia.
The rap was the work of The Lonely Island guys, hired for SNL after the buzz earned by their Creative Commons comedy site–so the process of which you speak started there.
oops
You forgot to mention the fact that Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = CRAZY DELICIOUS.
Word.
[...] The Times picks up on the success of the Lazy Sunday video — and the fact that the internet, not NBC, that gave it critical mass. (See my post below.) t is their obliviousness to their total lack of menace – or maybe the ostentatious way they pay for convenience-store candy with $10 bills – that makes the video so funny, but it is the Internet that has made it a hit. Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, “Lazy Sunday” has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com. [...]
SNL’s Nielsen ratings on 12/17/05: 6.1/14. Jeff, you can explain these numbers better than I, but suffice to say, SNL is far from dead or unwatched — actually it is massively popular — despite that (maybe because) old fogies like Jeff and I go to sleep well before it airs.
Ain’t no way that video would have been aspopular on the web without the massive exposure it received in (gasp) good ol’ fashioned broadcast TV…