Andy Samberg biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Andy Samberg grew up in a middle-class Jewish household with his father, photographer Joe Samberg, and his mother, elementary school teacher Margi Samberg. Andy Samberg attended Willard Junior High School in Berkeley, where he met his two best friends, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer. Together they invented and performed off-the-wall comedy sketches to entertain their friends and classmates. According to Schaffer, there was a practical motive behind their middle school antics. "There was some value in being funny," he says. "It's good for not getting beat up."

The trio continued on to Berkeley High School, but upon graduating in 1996 they went their separate ways for college. Samberg initially followed Schaffer to the University of California at Santa Cruz, but after one year he transferred to New York University to study film. The laid-back northern California native says he initially found life in the Big Apple rather shocking.

Samberg lived with three friends in a cramped, rodent-infested two-bedroom apartment. "There were rats and mice everywhere," he recalls. "I grew up in the Bay Area, so Im fairly 'at one' with nature, but this was different. California nature is lovely. New York nature is disgusting. At first, I was really grossed out by it." Nevertheless, Samberg stuck it out in Manhattan, graduating from NYU with a BFA in film in 2000.

In 2001, after all three had graduated from college, Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone reunited in Los Angeles. Schaffer recalls, "After college we reconvened, moved to L.A. and lived in an apartment. And any dudes who live in an apartment will usually give it a name -- ours was called 'The Lonely Island.'" The roommates soon formed a three-man comedy troupe named "The Lonely Island" after their apartment.

With nothing more than a video camera, the trio began filming brief comedy sketches -- which they called "digital shorts" -- and posting them on the Internet. Taccone recalls, "We were putting up our stuff on [the Internet] when we didn't have jobs ... we were just using our [digital] shorts as an excuse to not work."

'Saturday Night Live'

Their hilarious digital shorts, including underground hits such as "White Power," "Regarding Andy," and "Awesometown," soon gained notoriety on the Internet, and in 2005 the trio were invited to write for the MTV Movie Awards. The host that year was Jimmy Fallon, who was so impressed by the three writers that he decided to introduce them to Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. Michaels recalls, "Jimmy Fallon was hosting, and we were talking, and he said, 'There are these guys writing on the [awards show] who are very funny.