Adam Sandler’s First Comedy Special in Years Does Something Astonishing (2024)

It needs to be said that, despite his current rehabilitation in the pop culture ferment, Adam Sandler has mostly starred in slop. I, like almost every other 33-year-old white guy on the planet, retain some fondness for the schlocky 88-minute comedies he produced in the late ’90s and early aughts: Billy Madison, The Waterboy, Big Daddy. But my affection for those films has much more to do with my wistfulness for a bygone, outrageously Y2K form of cable-TV osmosis that is impossible to replicate in the streaming age. It is 10 p.m. on a steaming summer night. You and your friends are a six-pack deep and crunched into an unventilated basem*nt den. Someone flips on Spike TV. Happy Gilmore is on. Life has never been better.

This is the world in which Sandler became a superstar, and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I haven’t revisited much of his work since I left for college. The jokes weren’t great then, and they’ve only gotten worse since. Sandler put us all through a truly grotesque late prime; I think even his most ardent defenders would struggle to go to bat for Click, or Pixels, or the Boschian nightmare of Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2. (Ten percent and 8 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively.) The Sandler cinematic formula wore thin quickly. There were a lot of fart jokes. A lot of poop jokes. And a potentially lethal dose of Rob Schneider.

And yet, as Sandler enters his late 50s, all of his crimes have been miraculously washed away. He has flipped his fortunes, crossing over into bona fide Hollywood royalty status. Last year, he won the Mark Twain Prize. Soon he’ll be starring in a Noah Baumbach movie. And Love You, his first stand-up special in six years, debuted on Netflix this week and has yet to leave the platform’s top 10 most-watched programs—undoubtedly bolstered by strong endorsem*nts from needle-movers like the New York Times. The comedy special is being framed as the next chapter in Sandler’s ongoing cultural coronation: more grist for the glow-up. Meanwhile, halfway through it, Sandler concludes a story about a genie who will only grant him three wishes if he gives a handjob to a man who just suffered explosive diarrhea in an airport bathroom. He hasn’t changed. Have we?

Sandler is adroit enough to drape Love You with the spoils of his newfound critical respect. The director here is Josh Safdie, one half of the Safdie brothers, who cast Sandler as the degenerate gambler Howard Ratner in the 2019 freak-out hit Uncut Gems. Sandler was the perfect complement to the Safdies’ one-of-a-kind sensory delirium—a world where everyone is perpetually taking a phone call in a crowded nightclub—and Josh Safdie sprinkles a little bit of that chaos into the preamble of this special. Sandler pushes through fans and hangers-on in the crowded halls backstage, everyone looking warmed-over, with gaping pores, under the piercing fluorescent lights. The venue resembles a dilapidated high school theater: cloistered and visibly uncomfortable, always threatening to fall apart. And it does, frequently. In one surreal sequence, a dog gallops toward the front row from the bowels of the green room, interrupting Sandler’s joke before getting scooped up by a mindful PA. (Those mishaps were planned, but Sandler didn’t know the shape they’d take until they happened.) The results bring to mind some of the edgier, more auteur-ish comedians on the circuit: Conner O’Malley, Sarah Sherman, Maria Bamford, all of whom are unlikely to appear in a Grown Ups 3.

But when it comes to the jokes, Sandler remains deep in his comfort zone. There is a bit about accidentally sending a dick pic to Al Pacino. He sings a song about his sister’s ugly new boyfriend. He blames the imaginary illiterate brother of “Merriam-Webster” for the spelling of words like “answer” and “enough.” There is an extended riff about how he applies Botox to his penis, thus removing its wrinkles, leading to a conundrum where the men in the YMCA bathroom believe Sandler is erect when he is, in fact, fully flaccid. It is not brainy material, but these stories are delivered amicably, in a stream-of-consciousness blabber, without a shred of grievance or any discernible political posture bleeding in from the margins. Sandler is unapologetic about the things he finds funny. That was true in 1995, and it’s still true in 2024.

And frankly, that might be what’s animating the ongoing Sandler renaissance. Nearly all his peers—particularly his ’90s-era Saturday Night Live compatriots—are heavily invested in what they perceive as a war for the soul of comedy. It has led to some exhausting, redundant seminars posing as stand-up specials. I never needed to hear Chris Rock say the word “woke,” but he still has dedicated swaths of his Netflix oeuvre to debating the ideology. Sandler should ostensibly fit the same mold: He’s a man in his late 50s who can credit much of his success to the lowbrow territory in which his filmography treads. And yet, if he feels under siege by sensitive snowflakes or whatever, Sandler scarcely shows it. Instead of fighting a culture war, he’s dedicated his craftsmanship to becoming astonishingly effective at telling the same dick, poop, and fart jokes he’s been telling for decades—trimming the fat, reforging their elements, until they land with something you could call grace. (It’s no wonder that these punchlines are at their most effective when they’re presented within the confines of a stripped-down stand-up set rather than a bloated ensemble film.) Sandler has checked out of the conversation that has made the consumption of contemporary comedy so litigious and annoying. There is a deftness in all this stupidity.

At the end of Love You, Sandler picks up a guitar and plays a song that functions like a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for the people who have inspired him throughout his career. He daisy-chains together the names of comedy royalty—Lucille Ball, Sam Kinison, Lorne Michaels, Jim Downey—before eventually landing on the gut punch of the departed Norm Macdonald and Chris Farley. (Sandler performed a different tribute to Farley on a Saturday Night Live stint, which was another crucial component of his reclamation.) In the chorus, Sandler doesn’t sing about comedy’s ability to change the world, or expose grave injustices, or adjudicate political correctness once and for all. No, instead, Sandler asserts that comedy’s most profound social power is how it can make someone feel good, when they were previously feeling sad. It is a radically modest statement in a realm of performers who tend to take themselves a bit too seriously. Maybe we really have changed, after all.