Samberg and Zuckerberg together onstage at the F8
Andy Samberg, best known to me as my future husband once he dumps Joanna Newsom (who even likes the harp? I mean, really), put on the ol’ jeans and hoodie and impersonated our fearless overlord, Mark Zuckerberg, at the F8 conference.
It was a real stretch for Samberg to play a curly-haired Jewish looking sort of guy. But the SNL sketch actor is a pro and managed to do it reasonably well as he preached to the assembled choir about Facebook’s success over the past year. “We’ve continued to expand throughout the world to the point that we’ve really stopped counting you guys,” he observed. (Member of the numberless mass since 2004 right here!)
To put the growth into the proper perspective, Samberg/Zuckerberg explained it thus: “It’s more people than the population of Europe, more people than the cast of Glee. It’s even more people than claim they came up with Facebook. Burn!”
After a few failed jokes explaining how important sharing has become, Samberg got in a dig at Twitter. “You wake up — share it with your friends. You run out of toothpaste — share it with your friends. You take a crazy big No. 2 — don’t share that, that’s for Twitter,” he joked.
Personally, I think that sharing should be strictly curtailed and certain types should have their sharing privileges revoked completely. Those folks include boring people, people who tell you exactly what they’re doing at any given moment without a trace of irony and people who think that joining a Facebook “cause” accomplishes anything at all in real world terms.
Basically, the only people that should be permitted to update their statuses are writers, comedians and so-called “intellectuals.” Sure, those people are insufferable in person, but online they’re magic.
Samberg did suggest a new feature I wish was real instead of a joke — the “I’m not really friends with these people” feature. “It lets everyone know I don’t want to be associated with these guys but I can only ignore them for so long,” he said.
But the half-funny joke party came to an end after the real Zuckerberg joined Samberg onstage for a “gathering of the Bergs.” Not even impersonations of other famous “Bergs” including Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark in The Social Network, and Mark Wahlberg (not Jewish!) could win him extra F8 time. It was time for our supreme leader, second only to Wen Jiabao, premier of China, to take over the show.
Watch Samberg’s performance in its entirety below:
