The Lonely Island Return To SNL With A Deliciously Disgusting Business Idea

Television Comedy Shows

The Lonely Island returned to "Saturday Night Live" with a brand new digital short, and it's perfect.

For weird little guys (it's me, I'm weird little guys) across the world, this is a huge moment. The Lonely Island — made up of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone — used to provide digital shorts nearly every Saturday night during their run on "SNL" (Samberg was a cast member and Schaffer and Taccone worked on the writing team but often appeared in the pre-taped sketches). Samberg left the show in 2012, but the trio — who still work together all the time — kept providing shorts here and there, like "YOLO" in 2013 (with an assist from Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar) and "Natalie's Rap 2," which reunited Schaffer, Samberg, and Taccone with Natalie Portman after their first short together in 2006. The latter was in 2018, so it's been six long years since we all got a Digital Short. 

Now that Samberg is back in Studio 8H playing Doug Emhoff to Maya Rudolph's Vice President Kamala Harris, he apparently brought the boys back together for yet another banger: "Sushi Glory Hole." Yes, it's as disgusting as it sounds, and it's absolutely delightful.

Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer are here with an amazing business idea: a Sushi Glory Hole

The short opens on cast members Bowen Yang and Kenan Thompson — alongside former cast member Maya Rudolph — in a boardroom waiting for the next presentation. They're wholly unprepared for what Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer's characters have to offer. The proposition: sushi fed to hungry customers through a bathroom's glory hole. (I'm not going to explain what a "glory hole" is. You can Google it.) 

Yang, Thompson, and Rudolph keep trying to leave, but keep getting blocked by the would-be businessmen: the guys don't let up. As cast members James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes drop to their knees in random bathroom stalls and receive a mouth full of fish, Samberg and Schaffer explain, "It's sushi being fed through a hole in the wall." (According to them, it's pretty high quality fish.)

So why would you want this? Say you're out on the town and forgot to eat dinner ("But you wanna be discreet / Can't be eating omakase in the middle of the street," Samberg notes), so you simply open the "SGH" app and find the nearest Sushi Glory Hole (it's probably in a club bathroom, and you want to look for the "sushi-sized hole in the wall"). Pretty simple stuff. A few specifics: you can also order sake and there aren't any "gimmicky rolls" but "just strictly nigiri coming out of the holes." (No substitutions or requests either.) Also, be careful which stall you pick, or you might get something ... really different.

The Lonely Island left SNL in 2012 — but they never stopped (never stopping)

Even though Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer, and Andy Samberg are all plenty busy separately, they still always find time to work together. As I mentioned, they kept making digital shorts for "Saturday Night Live" even after they left the show, and they're also filmmakers and producers. Together, the three have produced huge hits like Samberg's 2020 movie "Palm Springs," the Hulu original "PEN15," and the Emmy-winning Netflix sketch series "I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson" — and if you haven't watched their 2016 masterpiece (and unfortunate box office bomb) "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," I'm going to insist you queue it up and press play before you do literally anything else with your life. 

Considering that Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone have been friends since they met in junior high school, it makes sense that they keep working together ... and in 2023, Samberg hinted that they might have a new album in the works. The group briefly toured in 2019 and their last album, the soundtrack for Netflix's "The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience" — which stars Samberg as Jose Canseco and Schaffer as Mark McGwire — came out that same year.

Last year, Samberg told /Film that he, Schaffer, and Taccone would love to make a new album work despite their incredi(bad)ly busy schedules. "Every time one of us finishes something, they start texting the other two, being like, 'When are we going to make another album? What are you guys doing?' Then as soon as they start something else, then it's someone else's turn," Samberg said, before saying he's hopeful about the prospect. As a longtime Lonely Island devotee who spent the best 90 minutes of my life at their Philadelphia show, I'm hopeful too ... but "Sushi Glory Hole" is definitely a welcome surprise.