Andy Samberg Has a New Late-Night Gig: Being a Dad

Forget the stage: To Andy Samberg, all the world is a cartoon.

“I just love watching animation come to life,” he said. “I’ve always been in awe of it, and that informs a lot of my comedy, too. I’ve always liked Monty Python and Mel Brooks, where they treat real life as if it were a cartoon and anything can happen.”

In “Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation,” Samberg is back as the voice of Johnny, the mortal husband of the vampire Mavis (Selena Gomez), who has decided that her father, Dracula (Adam Sandler), needs a break from tending to everyone else’s holiday needs. So she books the family on a Monster Cruise, where the dark lord swoons for the ship’s mysterious captain, Ericka (Kathryn Hahn), who harbors a dangerous secret.

It has been a crazy few months for Samberg, the former “Saturday Night Live” cutup, who in May watched as his Fox police sitcom, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” was canceled after five seasons, only to be rescued a day later by NBC. And in June, the Lonely Island, his musical comedy trio with Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, gave its long-awaited first concert at Clusterfest in San Francisco. In a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, the harp-playing pop singer Joanna Newsom, while scurrying after their toddler daughter, Samberg, 39, talked about his year.

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

[Laughing] Johnny’s journey — we both woke up this morning ready to talk about Johnny’s journey. You know, him and Mavis have settled into married life, and they’re parents now. Which suddenly became very appropriate for me this year, as I am a new dad. I have a 1-year-old daughter. It’s the best.

He starts falling for the ship’s captain, but it turns out she’s actually a descendant of the Van Helsing family, which is well-known for vampire hunting. Suffice to say, there’s some mixed emotions there. I guess you could say it’s the greatest and most tortured romance since “Romeo and Juliet.”

It was a very interesting 24 hours. Me personally, I thought we were coming back. So it was definitely a shock when we found out that they were canceling it. I’m a producer, so I was in very close touch with [the executive producers] Dan Goor, Mike Schur and David Miner about the possibilities of going somewhere else and went into an immediate business mode of, OK, let’s save it. Where can we go? What are the options?

And then the unexpected thing was this massive upswell of support on social media, which, yes, included supercool famous people like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sean Astin, Mark Hamill and Guillermo del Toro. But also, just so many people all over the world talking about what the show meant to them. We were all texting each other, like, “Whoa, we’re trending on Twitter, and are you hearing these beautiful things people are saying about our show?” It made us feel fantastic. And then in the eleventh hour NBC swooped in, and it was like getting to go to your own funeral and hear how much everyone loved you and then getting to be alive still. [Laughs]

It’s a fine line, because we have set up a promise that the show is funny, and that’s the backbone of it. But I think the writers have done an incredibly good job of walking that line when we’ve done slightly heavier episodes where there are still hard laughs but it doesn’t sacrifice the subject matter.

The timing finally worked out that all three of us were 100 percent available, not just for the dates but also for the months leading up to the dates that it takes to put together a proper show. Chris Parnell came out and did “Lazy Sunday,” Michael Bolton did “Incredible Thoughts” and “Jack Sparrow,” and T-Pain did “I’m on a Boat.” It was really cool to feel that live energy for something that we’ve been accumulating for 12 to 14 years now. It felt like a huge payoff. And we definitely want to keep doing it.

It’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just like a beautiful, incredible dream. It has surpassed every expectation I ever had. It’s definitely been very blissful.

No, I am. I had good training for parenthood by working at “SNL” The sleep deprivation part of it has been like, “Oh, right — this feeling.” But there’s so much less stress because the baby’s not going live at 11:30.