Learning to love Adam Sandler
He's the fight-prone, working-class loon in some of the best comedy movies of the past decade, but Adam Sandler is seriously talented
It was 1983. Adam Sandler – just 17 years old – was just kicking back at Stitches comedy store in Boston with friends, being entertained by the fledgling stand-ups. Suddenly, he got a hunch that he “could do that.”
Completely unannounced, he just got up when the stage was clear and started being funny. The audience began laughing. And then they laughed some more, and by the time he’d finished it was obvious that – given the right breaks – this guy could be laughing all the way to the bank.
Since then Adam Sandler has made more than 30 films, averaging a $76million gross. According to Forbes magazine in 2007, for every dollar he got paid, Sandler’s movies made nine gross income. His Happy Madison production company (named after two of his films: Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison) is based on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, and is responsible for most of them.
Sandler’s next movie, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (pictured above), opens in August through Sony Pictures. In it he plays a crack Mossad security agent (Israel’s brutal take on the SAS) who decides to turn it all in and become a hairdresser in New York. If the trailer is anything to go by, it’s another corker from America’s blue-collar, box-office diamond.
First break
Sandler initially honed his skills on the stand-up circuit of clubs and universities. It didn’t take long before he grabbed the attention of TV execs. In 1987 he landed his first TV role, as the Huxtables’ family friend Smitty in The Cosby Show. But it was while working in an LA comedy club that he got his major break, after being spotted by comedian Dennis Miller who recommended him to Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels.
Saturday Night Live is the comedy TV show in America, having featured everyone from Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and John Belushi to Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller and Chris Rock over the years. For any self-respecting comic, this is the promised land. Sandler was hired in 1990 as a writer and the following year featured as a major player on air. ‘The Chanukah Song’, a homage to famous Jews written for the show, became an airplay hit on American radio. The promised land had a new messiah.
Rough diamond
Sandler was soon in demand for films. His high-energy, bad-tempered demeanour, offset by a smattering of boy-next-door vulnerability, proved hilarious and charming. Men instantly knew exactly ‘what he meant’, and women liked his brutal honesty, while also harbouring a sneaky suspicion that this rough diamond could be saved by the right girl.
Among his first cinema releases was Happy Gilmore in 1996, in which he played a short-fused but good-hearted, accidental golf pro who has to overcome the odds to succeed. Happy Gilmore was not only a very funny movie, it also made the stuffy sport of golf cool and accessible to millions.
Working class hero
Overcoming the odds was to become a trademark. In Billy Madison, his first major movie role a year earlier, Sandler had played an uneducated man repeating school grades 1-12 in order to gain the respect of his father, along with the right to a multi-million-dollar fortune. It is a formula Sandler has perfected on the way to establishing himself as America’s most bankable working-class hero.
This scenario is often compounded by his characters’ penchant for blue-collar food brands such as Subway, Snack Packs and Popeye’s Chicken. Hey, the guy even eats the same fast food as us!
While the public couldn’t get enough of these early films, the critics hated them, a fact that probably explains why Sandler rarely does print interviews. His reluctance to take the press on meant that the hacks could glibly write him off as a one-trick pony. In 2002, however, the critics were forced to consume a large portion of humble pie.
Genuine actor
Punch-Drunk Love, a drama in which he plays a socially awkward work obsessive with occasional violent impulses, received overwhelmingly positive reviews and proved that Sandler was by no means trapped in goofball comedy land. The brilliant Reign Over Me, a drama about a man who lost his entire family in the 9/11 attacks, compounded Sandler’s new-found status as a genuine ‘actor’.
Sandler’s best reviews always come when, as with Punch-Drunk Love, The Wedding Singer and the first 40 minutes of Anger Management, the essential message of the film is serious, even if the tone is comical. Personally, I like him because he’s always got a daft look on his face and a twinkle in his eye that suggests something unusual is about to happen.
Adam Sandler’s later films have undoubtedly proved he can take himself seriously and that we should also. But it’s his ability to laugh at himself and persuade us all to join in that makes us love him the most.
Story by Tim Southwell
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