Some Jews, that is. Despite my Jewish background, due to a rare genetic transmutation, I was born without a tradition of comedy. Though I suppose it's better than what happened to my brother Jeffrey, whose jokes about Borscht and summer camp got so bad he had to have his tradition removed from his right lung when he was 12.

Anyhow, I'm glad Andy finally brought this often terrible affliction to the world's attention in an interview with Northwestern University's North by Northwestern in which he also explains the origins of The Lonely Island and answers the inevitable how-did-you-get-famous-and-how-can-I-get-famous-in-the same-way question:

You’re here through Hillel. How has your Jewish background affected your comedy?
It’s hard for me to really gauge. I don’t do a lot of comedy about Judaism, but obviously a lot of my heroes were Jewish. You have Mel Brooks and your Marx Brothers and your Larry David. So it’s affected it enormously and really not at all. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything comedically where the joke of it had to do with Judaism and Jewishness, but there’s definitely a proud tradition of comedy in the Jews.

How did your sketch group, The Lonely Island, begin?
Akiva [Schaffer] and Jorba [Taccone], I’ve known them since the seventh grade. And they were better friends with each other in junior high, and then we all started hanging out together in high school, at Berkeley High. We were all kind of just goofballs. After we graduated college, we all three kind of just, well I don’t know how it even happened, we just sort of happened to start talking, and all three of us were kind of interested in doing the same thing.

So the three of us moved to L.A. and rented an apartment and had a couple of pretty low-rank years, eating canned food and working temp jobs. Then we started shooting around stuff, just borrowing friends’ digital cameras and just shooting stuff. Then Akiva, with his brother’s help, started putting it onto a Web site and that started to grow. And then just on from there. We kept shooting, got involved in other stuff, started meeting more people, did a few pilots and I was doing stand-up the whole time.

Get the full interview here.

On his new friend Jonah Hill:

"I texted Jonah the other day while I was taking a sh-t. I wrote, 'I'm taking a sh-t and wanted to let you know I'm thinking of you.' He wrote back, 'That's weird, I was thinking of you too, but I was watching another dude take a sh-t.'

"So, our friendship is going good so far."

Blender, September 2007

Previously: Andy Samberg on CCI
Jonah Hill on CCI

On waking up:

"At SNL, it's built for the kind of guys we are, which is sleep through the day and stay up late -- and on a movie, you're up really, really early... Really early. And for me, personally -- I know it's bad for them, but for me personally, it's really hard to wake up in the morning. And when you're shooting for daylight, which we were, you got to get up at 5 in the morning.

And I'm sure people with regular jobs are, like, 'Stop your crying.' But we intentionally geared our life to NOT HAVE TO DO THAT, and then you're like 'Finally! The big dream! A movie! And now you have to have ... a ... regular person schedule.'"

Cinematical

Andy Samberg's first big movie Hot Rod is out in theaters today, and The Onion AV Club has a new interview with him. Here, he talks about the influence of Lonely Island on the flick:

AVC: Did this feel like a bigger, more expensive Lonely Island short?

AS: It definitely has that feeling to me, anyway. It certainly has a lot of the story and the comedy of Pam Brady's original script, but it's tough to put something through the three-of-us strainer and not have it come out a little Lonely. I think it's equal parts Paramount and Pam Brady—those are two separate things. As it is, we definitely have our stamp on it.

Get the rest of your Samberg fix at The AV Club.