How the Black Eyed Peas Inspired "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah"

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🎶Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, spooky, scary🎶: An oral history of the 30 Rock Halloween/bar mitzvah songhttps://t.co/tqagz1KSHE pic.twitter.com/XJ1H4L9Z8I
- LAist (@LAist) October 23, 2018

• If you were ever a fan of the sitcom 30 Rock, you probably remember Tracy Jordan's "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" cutaway joke song from the 2007 episode "Jack Gets the Game".
• Showrunner Robert Carlock and writer Tami Sagher say they always tried to jam a lot of jokes into their 21 minutes of showtime, which is why they did a lot of cutaway jokes, which were often expensive and time-consuming.
• Carlock wrote the first line - "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, spooky, scary" - into his original script for the episode, partly because of the Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling". In that song, they say "Mazel Tov" at one point, and he reasoned that they may have added that line in order to make sure the song got played at Bar Mitzvahs. He then envisioned Tracy Morgan's character Tracy Jordan trying to do something similar in order to keep getting royalty checks, because he'd done a lot of other money-making schemes throughout his career, and then conflating that idea with a holiday novelty song.
• Sagher added the second line - "Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves" - and they filmed the eight second cutaway for the episode on a cemetary set with Tracy in a werewolf costume. She thinks the visuals for the video helped it catch on, because it looked like a "live action cartoon, in the best way".
• When the short clip became popular, Sagher wrote the lyrics for a full version of the song. The show's musical director and composer Jeff Richmond wrote the music, and Donald Glover imitated Tracy Morgan, who wasn't available to record. Glover also contributed to the lyrics, and ad-libbed on top of that. The result was this, which Sagher calls "our Monster Mash" and is played at Bar Mitzvahs as well:

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This is probably my favorite joke from 30 Rock, with The Rural Juror as a close second. What's your favorite novelty song? Joke from 30 Rock?