What if two baseball stars of the 1980s had secretly recorded a rap album? That joke is the entire premise of The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, a 30-minute comedy and music special from 2019 directed by Akiva Schaffer and Mike Diva.
What is The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience about?
The comedy group The Lonely Island takes aim at Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, the pair nicknamed the Bash Brothers, and imagines them at the height of their fame. Instead of a conventional story with scenes and dialogue, the special is presented as a visual rap album: one song follows another, each with its own video, and together they sketch an exaggerated portrait of the two athletes and the decade around them. The setting is the Bash Brothers' 1980s heyday, so the look and the sound lean hard on that era. As the word 'unauthorized' in the title makes plain, this is parody from first track to last, not a documentary or a biography.
About the cast
Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone lead the cast, and Schaffer also shares the directing credit with Mike Diva. Around them the credits list Hannah Simone, Jenny Slate, Sterling K. Brown, Jim O'Heir and Stephanie Beatriz. For a half-hour piece that is a long line of recognisable names, which fits a format made of short, separate musical numbers.
Context & significance
Two genre labels describe the special, comedy and music, and neither works without the other here. The humour is delivered through the songs, and the songs exist to carry the jokes. The form is unusual as well. A visual album strings music videos together into one continuous piece, a shape more often used by recording artists than by comedians, and applying it to a spoof of two sports figures is a large part of the gag. At 30 minutes it is closer to a single episode of television than to a feature, so it can be watched in one short sitting. It is an American production released in 2019. Viewers who remember the sport and pop culture of the eighties will catch more of the references, though the basic idea of athletes posing as rappers needs no background.
Watching The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience on Ktime
The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is on K-Time for viewers who sign in with an account, while this page is open to read without logging in. K-Time is built for Persian speakers living abroad, and its menus and browsing are in Farsi.