Who Jumped First? Lonely Island & SNL vs. Improv Everywhere

A post on Time Warner’s new humor offering Office Pirates highlights the similarities between a prank from Improv Everywhere and a SNL Digital Short created by the Lonely Island boys that aired on the 5/13 episode. Both feature a man threatening to jump from a very low ledge with others taking it a wee bit too seriously. Both Gothamist and the Apiary have picked up the story, wondering if the sketch is a ripoff.

According to the Lonely Island blog, the sketch was actually filmed for the Alec Baldwin show, which aired the week of December 3, 2005. It’s just seeing the light of day now. The date of the sketch puts it at least a week before the Improv Everywhere sketch, which was pulled off according to the website of December 10th.

The post on the Lonely Island blog was made on Monday, so it doesn’t appear to be in defense of their sketch since the Office Pirates observation didn’t appear until Tuesday.

It does make some sense that we did not see the sketch until now, since the date of its creation does place it before the explosive “Lazy Sunday”, which made the Lonely Island boys more likely to actually get these short video bits on. Is it possible the comedy muse just struck two people at the same time?