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WATCH: The trailer for Hot Rod

Although their relationship became primarily the long distance–by phone variety, the trio reunited after college, each with a degree and without a job. Clearly, something had to change.

Schaffer recalls, "We all had this one day at Jorm's parents' house in Berkeley [when] we just literally sat there and went, 'Should we move to L.A., get regular jobs, and then start making short films to try to put together, like a demo reel of us, or should we stay in Berkeley where we could live for free, start making films right away, and then move to L.A. with a demo reel already made?'"

Andy Samberg and Isla Fisher in Hot Rod Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

They compromised between the two when the three of them moved to Los Angeles but also started The Lonely Island web site as a little online nook for the funny shorts they'd make for family and friends, named after the moniker they gave to the L.A. apartment they shared. At the time, "it wasn't viable to show things online" to producers, according to Schaffer, who, in between making shorts, toiled away as an assistant at a company that made movie posters. Taccone and Samberg landed jobs as production assistants on Spin City, and all three would take the occasional temp job as well — Schaffer recalls sitting around tying ribbons around the metal snowflakes that Fox handed out to their employees at Christmas.

Little did they know that Fox Television would be their first full-fledged employer when then-television president Gail Berman saw one of the group's more eccentric shorts and signed Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer to produce a pilot called Awesometown. (Berman later became a guardian angel of sorts to the trio since as president of Paramount she also greenlit Hot Rod.) "We were in that room with all these Fox executives and put on 'Just 2 Guyz,'" says Taccone, referring to a music video that features Schaffer rapping the joys of partying with spinach dip while Taccone reads John LeCarre. "And then that part comes on where it's like 'Who invited Steve? That dude's a cunt.' I'm like, oh my gosh, fingers crossed, and then as soon as it happened, they just had this huge laugh, and we're like, 'Holy shit, I guess we can work with Fox.'"

The pilot that Taccone and crew turned in for Awesometown, which now lives on in cyberspace via The Lonely Island, shouldn't have disappointed those who would laugh at "Just 2 Guyz." It mixed The Lonely Island's reverence for pop culture with its irreverence for everything else in sketches like The 'Bu, a parody of The O.C. that hinged not on soap opera largesse, but the actors pointing directly into the camera because the episode is in 3D, a joke that's compounded when a goofy smurf-like creature shows up to instruct audiences when to put their glasses on. Needless to say, the show wasn't picked up.

"I think the thing we started questioning a little bit was: Is what we think is funny ever going to translate on the bigger scale?" Samberg says. "Because we knew that we still thought what we were doing was good."

It didn't take long for the rest of the world to come around. When Lorne Michaels hired the trio to work on Saturday Night Live in 2005 — Samberg as one of the show's cast members and Taccone and Schaffer as writers — the internet had come of age, and The Lonely Island had already laid the groundwork for a string of one-click wonders on YouTube. But, just as importantly, the irony that had been the basis for a previous generation of comedy had begun to wear thin in response to an unpopular war, an environmental crisis, and a world in which what was once the fodder for satire had become a little bit too real. For a generation where escapism reigns supreme, no explanations were needed for why the group's first short, "Lettuce Heads," (Samberg and Will Forte simply chomping on heads of lettuce during a serious discussion) found its audience. My Dinner With Andre for the Y generation, the short demonstrated both the audaciousness and simplicity that have come to define The Lonely Island.