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.