The Lonely Island member didn’t realize until about “midway through” that West was serious: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, wait, no, this is just happening.’”
Akiva Schaffer couldn’t help but feel like he’d seen this film before when Kanye West (Ye) infamously interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
The Lonely Island member, who served as a writer on Saturday Night Live for six years, explained that he initially thought West was ripping off his own 2007 SNL sketch when interrupted Swift at the event before quickly realizing that the rapper was serious. In the sketch, West crashes several award ceremonies that he declares he should’ve won, including the Kids’ Choice Award for Best TV Show, the Nobel Prize for Physics, and a Best Pumpkin competition at a state fair.
“[West] was a little bit famous for bad award show behavior — for being either a poor loser or speaking out on behalf of others — but the Taylor Swift famous moment you’re thinking I’m talking about has not happened yet,” Schaffer said on Monday’s episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast. “That happens a year from now.”
Still, Schaffer said that West’s bad awards etiquette was “already known” — so much so that the rapper even suggested it as a potential idea for a sketch that Schaffer and then-SNL head writer Seth Meyers wrote together.
So, naturally, when West appeared onstage and took the microphone from Swift, Schaffer thought it was a clever callback. “I remember thinking at the VMAs, live, ‘Oh this is so funny, but he’s kind of ripping off our bit. I wish he had called us to like, help us work on this.’”
Schaffer then began contemplating whether or not the bit belonged to him, Meyers, or West. “I was like, eh, but it’s really his bit,” he continued. “I like, went through the whole process of like, but it’s really his bit, ‘cause he’s the one that called said, ‘I’d like to do something about that.’ We just cracked the code on what the actual sketch would be and that’s fine.”
It took Schaffer until about “midway through” West’s tirade to comprehend that the rapper was actually being serious. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, wait, no, this is just happening,” he confessed, “but it was so weird, because he does it like, six times in the thing we did, and we shot it like over and over, so he had it down pat.”
Meyers also remembered how Twilight alum Taylor Lautner, who was dating Swift at the time, hosted the show later that year and “karate-kicked a cardboard cutout of Kanye West” during his opening monologue. He added, “That’s why, in ‘Power,’ [West] says, ‘F— SNL and the whole cast.’”
When Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone later asked if that’s really why West dissed SNL on the 2010 track, Meyers replied, “I assume so, because when it happened, we went back and we’re like, ‘I don’t feel like we’ve ever joked down Kanye.’ And then I think that was [it].”
Taccone responded, “Oh wow, that’s a way lamer reason than I thought it was going to be. I thought we had have done some cutting barb, or something.”
