The latest hit for "Saturday Night Live" on the Internet began taking shape on Sept. 24, when Andy Samberg and a group of his colleagues on the show were sitting around their offices, scrounging for a celebrity or politician "who could really use a love song right now." Around the same time, Seth Meyers, the show's head writer, was imagining a skit in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, would be depicted on a wild night out on the town.

Before long the ideas fused, and by last Saturday, opening night for the 33rd season of "Saturday Night Live," the group had produced a three-minute music video titled "I Ran So Far Away." In it, a crooning, piano-playing Mr. Samberg and a doppelgänger for the Iranian president (his castmate Fred Armisen, bearded and in a gray suit and open-neck dress shirt) dance and appear to fall in love -- giving apparent lie to Mr. Ahmadinejad's contention at Columbia University that there were no homosexuals in Iran.

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