Andy on Saturday Night Live

On September 13, 2005, the Lonely Island website confirmed that Samberg would be joining Saturday Night Live as a featured player, while Schaffer and Taccone would join the show's writing staff. Samberg's first appearance was a commercial parodying Morgan Stanley.

While his live sketch role was limited in his first year, he did a few non-live sketches. For the December 17, 2005 show, he and Chris Parnell starred in a Digital Short called Lazy Sunday, from which Samberg and the show gained significant media and public attention.

Samberg has had more prominence in non-live segments over live segments overall, including appearing as a taco restaurant patron along with Bill Hader and Jason Sudeikis in the commercial parody Taco Town, Jack Johnson in a fake commercial for casual shoes shaped like feet, a young Chuck Norris, a hardcore gangster rapper in Viking apparel alongside Natalie Portman, and a parody commercial for lettuce in which he and Will Forte took large bites out of heads of lettuce during lulls while discussing a friend's death.  Another prominent digital short for Samberg was on the Tom Hanks/Red Hot Chili Peppers episode where he and Hanks play lead singers to a fictional 1990's techno band called Ariel and Efrim.