The Other Kind of iPad

Mere minutes before Steve Jobs strode on the stage with the first major technology news of the decade, writer Bruce McCoy hopped on Twitter and randomly declared: “If the Apple announcement is an iPad, I want a residual check!”

Well, that’s unlikely, but he and co-writer Tamar Sagher got something at least as precious in show business, sudden YouTube superstardom.

You see, while the Twitterverse erupted in tampon jokes seconds after Jobs unveiled the oversized iPod Touch he hopes will revolutionize all, McCoy and Sagher were basking in the glory of knowing they’d already told that joke. And funnier. On MadTV. Four years ago. See?

Not surprisingly, their iPod spoof from the late, great Fox sketch comedy show instantly became a Web sensation and #MadTV was even, briefly on Wednesday, a trending topic on Twitter. The Huffington Post and DListed.Com put the clip out front, too.

“It’s funny because everybody on Twitter is making Maxi-pad jokes anyway and we’re like, ‘Hey, guys, you totally blew it. We did it already,’ ” said Sagher, now a writer for HBO’s Bored To Death.

Indeed, the writers were both awestruck and dumbstruck watching their aged work suddenly became the center of the cultural zeitgeist. The show was a hit in the pre-YouTube era, so this is Sagher and McCoy’s first taste of the sort of recycled Internet glory that writers of Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show now enjoy regularly.

That they got the sketch on the air in the first place was a minor miracle, Sagher said. She and McCoy had tried to get menstruation-related gags into the show before only to be shot down by a squeamish executive director.

“I think this proves that nobody at Apple ever watched MadTV,” Sagher said. “And, also, wow there must’ve been no women in the room when they were naming that.” But McCoy, who is working on a TV pilot that features actress Arden Myrin who appears in the sketch, predicted that Apple’s tablet “will be cool enough that everyone will eventually forget it the other connotations.”

Hey, it worked for the Wii, didn’t it?