Talking Bieber and beyond with Andy Samberg and buds

Is there anything left to parody in the world of pop-music docs?

Take Justin Bieber's self-promoting extravaganzas Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and Justin Bieber's Believe - notably the soul-baring scene from Bieber's Believe where he runs his finger over some upper-lip peach fuzz and observes, "This 'stache is to make me feel a little bit older."

Take Katy Perry's Katy Perry: Part of Me, which tracks the bubblegum princess on her California Dreams World Tour, stopping to reflect about "the depressing, dark times" she's experienced along the way. "But it's a journey. . . . I feel like a stronger, better person because of it."

Take One Direction: This Is Us.

Please.

"Well, yes, there's something left to parody," says Andy Samberg, who's front and center as boy-band-star-turned-rapper Conner4Real in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a send-up of the whole genre of self-reflecting celebrity "popumentaries."

Written by Samberg with his junior high school buddies and Lonely Island comedy troupe pals Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, Popstar, now in theaters, runs on the same fuel - ego, vanity, advanced navel-gazing - as the movies it's mocking.

"As the world gets more ridiculous, it doesn't mean that you can't make fun of that," says Taccone.

"But also, those movies aren't that ridiculous," says Schaffer, who directed Popstar along with Taccone. All three gentlemen - who honed their writing and videomaking chops on Saturday Night Live during five seasons, starting in 2005 - dropped into town a few weeks ago.

"Those movies are straightforward promotional celebrations of those particular people," Schaffer continues. "They very clearly are what they are - if you're a fan of this person, then this is the experience of getting to know them a little better."

The intent of these films, adds Samberg, "is to humanize these seemingly untouchable pop stars."

And the human side of Conner4Real? Not pretty.

Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone have been working on Popstar for more than two years, writing songs - "Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)," "Things in My Jeep," "Incredible Thoughts," and "I'm a Weirdo" are a few of the gems - and writing shtick. The story follows a boy-band star ("Ever since I was born, I was dope") whose solo career is going south.

How's Conner4Real going to rebound? How's he going to make payroll for the 32 people on his personal staff?

And just like the docs the film is busy pasting and pastiching, Popstar makes time for pensive musings by real-life celebs, sitting and musing about the movie's hero.

Among the cameos in Popstar: Mariah Carey, Simon Cowell, Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, DJ Khaled, Adam Levine, Pink, RZA, Seal, Justin Timberlake, Carrie Underwood, and Questlove.

Not bad.

"Here's the thing about pop stars - they are very busy," Taccone says, addressing a question about the people they couldn't get for the film. "We shot it in the height of summer, when a lot of people were doing their European tours. . . . It would have made more sense to have shot the movie in February, when everybody's on break."

Still, they did all right. Seal, for one, deserves a Medal of Valor for what Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone put him through. (The Popstar trailer offers a frightening glimpse.)

"We got very spoiled working at SNL," says Samberg, "because there would be a very big star - a musical star, and someone from the acting world, generally, every single week - who we just had at our disposal. . . . So we have, cameo-wise, a very high bar.

"We expect maybe more than we deserve" - he laughs - "but we were really lucky in terms of how many people did show up."

Samberg, who stars on the Fox cop show sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Schaffer, who directed 2012's Ben Stiller vehicle The Watch, and Taccone, who directed 2010's Will Forte vehicle, MacGruber, first bonded in the hallways and at the cafeteria tables of Willard Junior High in Berkeley, Calif. The year was 1993.

"I would say it's the exact same things as now: We bonded over music and comedy," says Schaffer. "The same way kids of every generation find friends into the same kinds of things - it's in Freaks and Geeks, with them quoting Monty Python: 'Oh, you like that?! I like that!' "

And the more obscure the comedy is, the deeper the connection.

"You know you're really going to like each other," says Samberg. "It's like a shorthand."

"And our goal in comedy is to create that kind of thing, so that we can picture 15-year-olds in school who feel maybe not like the coolest kids in school, but they're listening to us, or watching us, and saying 'You like that, too!?' "

Adds Taccone: "The highest compliment is when people come up to us and say, 'Me and my friends quote your thing all the time.' And that was us back then. We've achieved the thing we most admired."

srea@phillynews.com

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