Seth Meyers Recalls “SNL” Sketch ‘Failure’ That ‘Still Sticks with Steve Martin’

Steve Martin’s 2006 Saturday Night Live hosting gig will forever sit in the minds of Seth Meyers and the Lonely Island.

On Monday’s April 29 episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Meyers, 50, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone reflected on the unforgettable surfer sketch they worked on for Martin.

The Late Night with Seth Meyers host said it is a sketch he thinks about “all the time, mostly because every time I see Steve Martin, he brings it up.”

He asked his co-hosts to explain the sketch, “surf meeting,” noting, “You guys wrote it.”

“Surf meeting was a classic format for us, which was one person sucking and not being able to take a hit over and over and over again, like way too many times,” said Samberg, 45.

He added that it featured “a bunch of surfers meeting on the beach,” and recalled being the leader of the “surf crew.” In the sketch, he asks Martin’s character, who’s “in an old-timey bathing suit looking super dorkish,” to leave.

“It was making us laugh so hard when we were writing it,” Samberg said. “We were like, ‘This is the best thing ever.’ It actually played great at the table, and we were like, ‘We did it! We cracked a super funny sketch for Steve Martin where he kills, and we get to have it be on the show.’ ”

“When we rehearsed it the first time without cameras, everyone laughed again, and we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s the best,’ and then we just started rehearsing it, and for whatever reason, it started tailing off,” he continued.

While Samberg added that it might have been something that wasn’t meant to be acted out, Taccone, 47, said the staging and multiple characters might have been the problem. Schaffer, 46, pointed out that Martin tried to be “way goofier to try to save the sketch,” to which Taccone agreed.

“As morale plummeted in the success of the sketch, Steve fought so f—ing hard,” recalled Taccone. “And I actually remember, like, in between dress [rehearsal] and air going in to give him last notes on it very disheartened, and just being like, ‘I wish we had more time,’ and he was like, ‘I wish we did too. It’s so good, and it’s not gonna be good.’ ”

Samberg said that after the show, Martin was “distraught about it because he liked it, and we all thought it was going to be a winner, and it had a great rhythm to it.”

After discussing the “stupid names” that “all of the surfers ended up having,” Samberg said, “writing surf meeting was one of the most fun moments of my entire time at SNL,” referring to it as “slumber party giggles.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Meyers also looked at it positively, adding, “The great thing, and why surf meeting endures for me, is that for all his successes, it is a failure that still sticks with Steve Martin.”