While in my hometown for the holidays, I found myself revisiting a favorite from my tween years: the SNL affiliated comedy music trio, The Lonely Island. I was only eight when their first studio album, Incredibad, debuted in early 2009 and not much older when their last hit the shelves. Listening to them a decade later as an adult, I expected to cringe a bit at the “potty humor” and socially unaware jokes I enjoyed as a thirteen-year-old. Now, don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of that, but I was also caught off-guard by the group’s constant (and sometimes quite insightful) probing into cultural views on gender and sexuality. Maybe it’s just my obsession with these subjects, but I couldn’t help but notice how the trio’s albums are absolutely saturated with humor that plays with male identity, misogyny, and queerness. In fact, this music may be partially responsible for inspiring my obsession. The Lonely Island introduced me to the concept of docking for the first time; they made my nine-year-old brain seriously question why men didn’t wear condoms 24/7; they gave me space to laugh-along to “grown up humor” while simultaneously realizing how little I knew about sex and how much there was to learn. These popular comedy albums shaped how I (and probably countless others) understood the cultural landscape of sexuality and gender I was growing into. So, what was that landscape they portrayed?
Well, like most media does, The Lonely Island’s music often upholds cultural assumptions that can be harmful and inaccurate. There are plenty of problematic ideas on gender and sexuality reflected in their work, and plenty of old tropes regurgitated for laughs. Isn’t it funny how men love sex so much even when women don’t? Isn’t it funny men are always trying to have sex? Isn’t it funny how men’s wives never let them have sex? The members’ personas brag about sexual conquests with women and show more agency in sexual decision making than the female characters. Although these ideas are harmful and inaccurate, they’re also widespread. Similar concepts were constantly peddled to me through raunchy comedies like How I Met Your Mother and American Pie, and I still hear them echoed in media frequently, so it’s hard for me to fault The Lonely Island for this specifically.
There was another theme frequent in jokes of the that era that I’m less accustomed to in my current media consumption: jokes about gay men, or more accurately, “gayness.” When it came to revisiting The Lonely Island, this stood out to me starkly. While trans and intersex people as well as women who love women tend to be almost entirely ignored in their music, male homosexuality is constantly invoked for laughs. Sometimes it’s the cherry on top of a larger joke, like when characters have sex with a giant male fish or alien or when they write “freaky fanfiction” about Marmaduke and Garfield. Sometimes, though, homosexuality is the joke, or at least the meat of it. This is the case in two of my favorite songs from middle school: “No Homo” and “The Compliments.”
The joke of “The Compliments” is that the three members of the group are giving each other increasingly elaborate, sometimes erotic, compliments under the guise of marketing each other to women. To punctuate this and make it explicit, the song’s feature, rapper Too $hort plays the straight man (pun very much intended) who comments on how they’re “weird motherfuckers” who he suspects are gay. I loved this song when I was younger, but looking back it feels like a relic of a time when men’s queerness was itself a joke even to the center-left audience of Saturday Night Live. To be fair, Too $hort’s lyrics also say there’s nothing wrong with being gay and they were “born that way”, but that’s a rhetorical bandage that serves to excuse the truth that the comedy of the song relies on homosexuality itself being funny. In fact, homophobia is often proliferated by people who don’t consciously believe there’s anything wrong with being gay. C. J. Pascoe’s 2005 study “Dude, You’re A Fag” shows how teenagers who frequently use “fag” and “gay” as insults often imagine them as free from homophobic bias, even when they’re weaponized specifically against boys who are perceived as acting more effeminate. Those who hurl homophobic slurs can perceive gay as a “legitimate, if marginalized, social identity” and one high schooler even echoed Too $hort’s statement, describing gay people as “born that way.” Yet, still, by using queerness as laughable in itself (or, in the case of the high school students, an insult in itself), heteronormativity is still reinforced. As a thirteen-year-old finding myself in queerness, “The Compliments”’ underlying homophobia did not even register to me. I liked media that acknowledged the existence of gay people without directly condemning them, and that’s all I noticed in the song.
It’s easy to sift through comedy from a decade or more ago and find problematic elements, and that can be important for understanding the media's role in proliferating harmful beliefs. At the same time, I actually admire much of The Lonely Island’s work, and not just as a guilty pleasure. Beyond technical aspects like production and wordplay, many of their songs convey genuinely witty, worthwhile commentary. “The Compliments”’ counterpart and predecessor is a good example of the nuance here. “No Homo” is also about men saying increasingly “gay sounding” things, making some of the humor rely on the idea that saying “gay things” is inherently funny. However, the framing is quite different. Instead of a straight man being present to call the members weird for their homosexuality, the explicit homophobia of the song comes from the very same characters who are expressing homosexual desires. No matter what the singers state, from simple friendly compliments to explicit fantasies about gay sex, they follow each line with the proclamation of “No Homo!” It’s also clear in the text of the song that this need to protect oneself from the accusation of homosexuality is socially imposed in male friend groups. “No Homo” is explicitly a suggested solution to the problem of wanting to compliment a male friend without being ostracized for it. In my opinion, this successfully reframes the joke. Instead of the comedy relying on the idea of men saying gay things, the butt of the joke is homophobia itself, and the toxic masculinity that enforces it.
In fact, many of The Lonely Island’s songs poke fun at toxic masculinity. One of my current favorites is their song “Hugs,” which has quite a sex-positive premise. By replacing “sex” with “hugs” in what’s otherwise a fairly typical song premise – men bragging about the women they get – the song points out the absurdity of how we treat sex in our culture. Ideally, sex is a fun activity: pleasurable, comfortable, and possibly enhancing intimacy. Yet, for some reason, our culture calls sex a conquest for men and a commodity for women. Women are expected to use sex as a prize for a good man or a playing chip rather than getting to enjoy it for its own sake. Men’s masculinity can be proven by shutting off emotional connection and successfully using women for sex. The absurdity of this is made hilariously evident by lines like “I’ll hug a girl like it don’t mean nothing” and one member bragging about losing all respect for women once he hugs them. Even the track’s opening line “We! Are not! Gentlemen!” pokes fun at toxic masculinity and forces the audience to consider why intimacy with women is so dually lusted after and denigrated in our culture.
Even songs that spread some problematic ideas about sexuality and gender, like “I Just Had Sex” and “Jizz In My Pants” are primarily making fun of normative ways of treating women sexually. “I Just Had Sex” can easily be interpreted as a song about masculinity’s obsession with sex as, at best, a source of male pleasure and, at worst, men’s claim to bragging rights. Instead of aiming to create a fulfilling erotic experience for everyone involved, the characters sing about how glad they are that women “let” them have sex, how they don’t understand why, and how excited they are to tell everyone they know that it happened.
“Jizz In My Pants” may get the thrust of its comedy from the idea of frequent premature ejaculation, yet many of its lyrics similarly critique toxic masculinity and, arguably, rape culture. When the characters are embarrassed by orgasming in increasingly absurd situations, they take out their embarrassment on the women around them. They blame the women, saying things like “It’s mainly your fault for the way that you’re dancing” and in one instance even threaten to call her a slut if she tells anyone. One character blames a cashier for his orgasm, saying she was “flirting a lot” by simply asking if he’d like to pay by cash or credit. Although the song is hilarious (in my opinion), it gets at some dark topics. The humor comes not only from the nonsensical ejaculations but also from the characters’ projection of their desires onto women and their refusal to accept that they, not the women around them, are responsible for managing their arousal. Although I never consciously picked up on this subtext in middle school, I’m grateful for it. My mind was inundated with the casual rape culture in pop songs like “Timber” and “Blurred Lines” and The Lonely Island was, in some ways, a subtle antidote.
In my opinion, the trio’s best track fuses their critiques of toxic masculinity and their propensity for gay jokes. “Spring Break Anthem” is very funny and genuinely makes me cry when I watch it. I doubt it will have quite that effect on you, yet I’m hesitant to spoil it or over-explain the joke. Suffice it to say, it manages to pull off a “gay joke” without putting queerness at the butt of it. Although its premise is noticeably (and thankfully) outdated at time of writing, its message is still painfully relevant; queer people are no more predatory or hypersexual than straight people. If you see relatively normative queers as rightfully more taboo than the harmful attitudes and practices that proliferate in heteronormative society, your vision is skewed.
Even exclusively in the area of gender and sexuality, The Lonely Island’s work is not perfect. When it comes to other forms of analysis I don’t feel properly equipped for, such as an interrogation of the racial politics of an all-white “fake rap” comedy group, I’m sure there’s much more to uncover about the negative views their music reflected and encouraged. At the same time, I must admit I’m glad to have grown into adolescence with “Jizz In My Pants” and “Spring Break Anthem” ringing in my ears. Through dick jokes and catchy comedy pop music, The Lonely Island helped me stoke my curiosity about sexuality and grow to understand the dynamics of heteronormative patriarchy around me. Plus, I have to admit, I still find a lot of their songs very funny.
By Aiden/Estelle Garrett
Made With Consultation From Sophie R Galarneau.