Seth Meyers is taking it back to the Lonely Island song that was so funny, it made him sick.
On the latest episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, the Late Night host lamented missing out on the extensive Dennis Franz/NYPD Blue conversation from the previous episode — and noted his surprise that Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone didn’t use the opportunity to bring up another Franz-related memory.
“I kinda couldn’t believe you guys talked about Dennis Franz for that long,” Meyers said, “and didn’t mention that the Dennis Franz line is the hardest I’ve ever laughed at a Lonely Island [song].”
Samberg confirmed that Meyers has an unusual fixation on the group’s track “Mona Lisa,” which they wrote and recorded for their 2016 movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. “You did like that joke a lot,” he said. “You, I think more than anyone I know, like that song. And people like that song, but it maybe is your favorite of our songs.”
Meyers hasn’t shaken the song since he first heard it. “I think about it all the time,” he admitted. “I’m really happy sometimes because the run of lyrics that starts, ‘I’m an American,’ is maybe my favorite series of lines.”
In the song, Samberg (as fictional pop singer Conner4Real) opines that Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous portrait is “an overrated piece of s‑‑‑.” Meyers’ favorite lines come from the song’s bridge, in which Samberg sings, “I am an American man/This is my native land. Where no one lies about paintings/But that’s not the case in France.”
Glen Wilson
Andy Samberg as Conner4Real in ‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’
He goes on to compare da Vinci’s subject to a certain Hill Street Blues actor. “Where the naked ladies dance and they look like Dennis Franz/You’re so mangy, Mona/Hair part wider than a country road/Unless you count cats, she died alone/The Mona Lisa sucks.”
Samberg reflected on the composition of the song on the podcast. “Melodically, it veers into Morrissey territory also, which is fun,” he said.
Meyers then revealed that the song elicited unusual physical reactions when he first heard it alongside his SNL and Late Night collaborator Mike Shoemaker. “The lore about ‘Mona Lisa’ is that you sent it to Shoemaker and I — we were in my office, and we laughed so hard that I threw up and he farted,” Meyers recalled. “I literally started choking and threw up into my trash can, and he farted.”
Schaffer was honored by Meyers’ reaction. “That’s wonderful,” he said.
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“Mona Lisa” didn’t make the final cut of Popstar in all its glory, as the song was trimmed down to a brief cutaway that only showed a fragment of its second chorus. But the full track was released on the movie’s soundtrack.
Listen to the full episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast above. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is currently streaming on Netflix.
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