Anyone who has seen at least one SNL Digital Short has a favorite SNL Digital Short. That’s the brilliance of the short-form video format pioneered for Saturday Night Live by The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) in the mid aughts. Each and every brief clip is creatively crafted yet utterly bizarre, […]
The post Andy Samberg Has a Surprising Candidate For Favorite SNL Digital Short appeared first on Den of Geek.
Anyone who has seen at least one SNL Digital Short has a favorite SNL Digital Short.
That’s the brilliance of the short-form video format pioneered for Saturday Night Live by The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) in the mid aughts. Each and every brief clip is creatively crafted yet utterly bizarre, perfect for appealing to all sorts of comedic sensibilities … provided those comedic sensibilities appreciate a good dick joke.
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Some folks’ favorite digital short is the nautical banger “I’m On a Boat.” For others, early phenomenon “Lazy Sunday” takes the crown. When then-SNL head writer Seth Meyers put together a March Madness-style tournament of the shorts, The Lonely Island’s peers selected “Motherlover” as the best of all time. While this online debate about the best SNL Digital Short is fun (and takes up space on the internet that would otherwise go to something unsavory) it also leaves out some pretty important voices: The Lonely Island themselves.
Thankfully Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer have recently begun delving into their digital works alongside Meyers on the aptly-named “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.” Every week, the four friends make their way through the SNL Digital Short canon in chronological order to discuss the creation of the work and their thoughts all these years later. As the podcast goes along (and the quad creates an increasingly complex database of memetic references involving actor Jack Quaid’s eating habits and the 2008 action film Righteous Kill), it feels as though it’s all building to the ultimate reveal of which short is The Lonely Island’s true favorite.
We couldn’t wait that long. That’s why, when Samberg and writer Neil Campbell stopped by Den of Geek Studio at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 to discuss the second season of their Comedy Central series Digman!, we requested that Samberg just go ahead tell us his favorite digital shorts. He kindly obliged, offering up unquestioned all-time classic, another modest hit, and one short that is truly off the beaten path of internet discourse.
“I have a bunch of them that I’m very fond of,” Samberg said. “I really like ‘Jack Sparrow.’ I feel like that one kind of encapsulates everything that we do and is still appreciated by true comedy heads. I really like the one we do called ‘Great Day’ where I’m on Commerce Street just gacked out of my mind. There’s one I did from my last season with Jake Szymanski and Jonah Hill called ‘Tennis Balls.’ That’s one that makes me laugh so hard. It was Jonah’s idea cuz there was actually a science video online of a guy who’s like ‘This is what happens when you get hit in the nuts with a tennis ball.’ We took it and ran very far with it.”
Surely, “Jack Sparrow” and “Great Day” are natural considerations for any list of the best SNL Digital Shorts. The former should always have a place in anyone’s top 10 and the latter is an underappreciated gem. “Tennis Balls,” on the other hand, is a real wild card choice from Samberg. This one hasn’t really cracked the cultural zeitgeist like other digital shorts. But based on a rewatch of the clip in question, perhaps it should!
The Jonah Hill and Samberg-starring clip is a touch longer than the average SNL Digital Short, approaching four minutes. But the extra time here is more than well spent as tennis ball after tennis ball is fired into Hill’s gonads as the camera examines the testicular trauma from countless angles. The short also makes time for a visit from some ghost hunters and then both kills and resurrects Hill via direct strikes to the nuts. Simply put: it’s a damn good time.
The best part of it, however, might just be its fidelity to the original clip in question. As Samberg mentioned, “Tennis Balls” was inspired by an episode of the FSN/ESPN series Sports Science (hosted by the wonderful John Brenkus who unfortunately died earlier this year). If you thought that Hill’s character’s striking goatee, lengthy cargo shorts, and dorky sandals were a creative flourish, get a load of this specimen:
Whether the goal is scientific study or comedic amusement, there is clearly no uniform more fitting for getting blasted in the balls.
Digman! season 2 premieres new episodes Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
The post Andy Samberg Has a Surprising Candidate For Favorite SNL Digital Short appeared first on Den of Geek.
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