A couple weeks ago, Andy Samberg did a parody of Mark Wahlberg in a throwaway sketch called “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals.” It was basically just Andy telling various animals “Say hi to your mother for me.”

It was pretty funny, but not amazing, and I doubt anyone would have paid any attention to it except that in an interview with the New York Post, Mark let it slip that he didn’t think it was very funny.

“Someone showed it to me on YouTube. It wasn’t like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, that’s for sure. And ‘Saturday Night Live’ hasn’t been funny for a long time. They’ve asked me to do the show a ton of times. I used to watch it when Eddie Murphy was there and Joe Piscopo and Bill Murray. I don’t even know who’s on the show now.”
– Mark Wahlberg interview in the New York Post

Now, here’s where it gets brilliant. In the most recent episode of SNL, Mark storms onto set during the opening scene and demands that Lorne tell him where Andy is. Later in the show, they aired this confrontation where Mark tells Andy his parody is way off, and then proceeds to confirm it.

To my mind, this means one of two things. Either Mark really was annoyed by the sketch, and they asked him on the show to make it up to him, or they planned this from the start, and asked him to complain in his next interview. Either way, totally genius.


2 Comments on “Mark Wahlberg vs Saturday Night Live”

  1. Mary says:

    You’re totally right! it was completely genius! I love Mark <3, and i think that it was PUBLICITY! JUST THAT, it was a joke (very funny by the way) Andy Awesome too! just the right thing!

  2. Ankhorite says:

    The episode in which the real Mark Wahlberg showed up was also the episode with the real Sarah Palin. In Palin’s backstage scenes, a llama was conspicuously present over her shoulder in most of the camera shots. Not a donkey, which would have been funny (Democrats, right?) but a llama, which SNL didn’t use in any of the skits I saw. Llama? A 133t speak joke about lamers?