Andy Samberg in Hot Rod Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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It's the morning after "Dick in a Box" has been nominated for an Emmy for best song. Obviously, the apocalypse is upon us.

The three-minute slow jam, an ode to the phallic present for all occasions with vocals by Justin Timberlake, has proved to be the gift that keeps on giving after being watched by millions on YouTube since its 2006 debut on Saturday Night Live. Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, the creative team behind "Box," were en route to a Seattle morning radio show when they got the good news.

"[There was] a lot of high fiving, a lot of gigglng. A lot of whaaaat?" reports Schaffer, the short's director, who had forgotten there was even a best song category when he received the first congratulatory e-mail. Sadly, the award isn't usually presented during the ceremony, so one shouldn't get his or her hopes up about the prospect of any time soon watching the words "Dick in a Box" escape the lips of a squirming presenter.

"If we don't [win], no hard feelings to the Academy," beams Samberg, the shaggy-haired star and cowriter of the song. "But the fact that it's nominated and called 'Dick in a Box' is already pretty sweet."

Life in general is pretty sweet for The Lonely Island, the comedy collective formed by the lifelong friends. Besides wrapping their heads around the possibility of an Emmy on their mantle engraved with "Dick in a Box," the trio's first film Hot Rod arrives in theaters this week. An off-the-wall debut that ranks right alongside films made by their comedy heroes Steve Martin (The Jerk) and Adam Sandler (Billy Madison), Hot Rod appears to be every bit the movie this trio set out to make. (How else can you explain a soundtrack dominated by '80s hair-band punchline Europe?) With so much going on, they nonetheless can't wait to get back to their days jobs on SNL because, as Taccone says, "when you get a good sketch, there's nothing quite like that feeling."

Which is one reason Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer have been friends ever since Schaffer first locked eyes with Taccone in his seventh grade Spanish class at Willard Junior High School in Berkeley, California.

"I saw this little short skinny white dude who looked pretty much like me," says Taccone, whose circle of friends grew to include Samberg, who was a year younger, and a bunch of pals who skateboarded together and made each other laugh. "It was just compiling friends into this big group of stupid dudes."

Adds Schaffer, "Every group of high school kids fucks around with each other. We perhaps did it a little more than most. Enough that sometimes outsiders of the group would come try to hang out with us and [after] 10 minutes and they'd be like, 'Ohhh, how do you guys even hang out all day?'"

But they did, each harboring plans to pursue the arts following high school. A year apart, Schaffer and Samberg both went to UC Santa Cruz as film students, though Samberg found being a Banana Slug was "too similar to Berkeley" and transferred to NYU after his sophomore year. Taccone, meanwhile, headed south to UCLA to study theater, following in the footsteps of his father Tony, the artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. A far cry from Hot Rod, Taccone would appear in his father's productions of classics such as Waiting for Godot, during which, he remembers, "I would constantly forget to take off my Swatch watch before the performances and so it kind of ruined that world a little bit."