Lady Gaga sits at a grand piano and plays the iconic opening chords to her smash hit “Shallow,” and Andy Samberg starts to sing, but something is off. Instead of Bradley Cooper’s lovely melodies, the funnyman sings in a ludicrously squeaky and off-key voice. Gaga only gets through three lines before she abruptly brings the song to a screeching halt. Clearly, the two stars have something else up their sleeves, and after some banter, they kick into The Lonely Island’s viral Justin Timberlake collab “Dick in a Box.”
Lady Gaga singing Timberlake’s parts in “Dick in a Box” wasn’t quite what we expected from the SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, but hey, if it works, it works. As with anything she sings, Gaga made it sound amazing. The performance soon turned into an all-star medley on The Lonely Island’s tunes, featuring T-Pain singing soulfully without Auto-Tune, and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder captaining a pirate ship. The Music Man is always here for a Lady Gaga performance, and seeing her flex her comedy chops was a real treat.
Peacock uploaded The Lonely Island medley on February 15, 2025, and in the month since then, it blew up to 3.8 million views. Fans loved hearing the group’s classics and added comments such as “As someone who has loved The Lonely Island for YEARS, this is everything I could have asked for” and “I could literally cry. This was so good. The Lonely Island was my childhood and I’m absolutely obsessed.”
The Lonely Island has given us many hype performances over the years. One of their greatest live cuts came when Samberg teamed up with Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine to sing a side-splitting rendition of “I’m So Humble” on The Voice. We’ve covered Levine’s on-point comedy skills before on The Music Man, and he def didn’t disappoint with his R&B vocals on the hip hop number.
The origins of “Dick in a Box” came when Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels asked Samberg to write a musical number featuring Timberlake for the show’s 2006 Christmas episode. Samberg and his The Lonely Island bandmates then wrote the song with Timberlake, Asa Taccone, and Katreese Barnes. The song became a viral hit on YouTube, and viewers streamed the skit more than 28 million times within the first 10 months of its release. The song has since become The Lonely Island’s signature song and is known as one of the greatest Christmas sketches on SNL.