In a rare sit-down interview, former SNL star and comedy icon Adam Sandler reflects on his career as he receives the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
PITTSBURGH — During every Adam Sandler stand-up show, he straps on his electric guitar and sings a song. Unlike the bite-size ditties he’s peppered through the set about selfies or baggy shorts, this one concerns his late, great “Saturday Night Live” buddy, Chris Farley.
The song, with its mix of low- and highbrow, the profane and poetic, could serve as a four-minute-and-22-second window into why the comedian and actor is being recognized with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. And it’s why his friends are glad that, at 56, he’s finally getting his due. All of which may sound strange for someone whose films — generational comedies that include “Happy Gilmore,” “The Wedding Singer” and “Grown Ups” — have earned more than $3 billion at the box office.
On a recent Friday afternoon, the bearded Sandler enters the room with a slight limp courtesy of hip replacement surgery he had in the fall. A few days earlier, he was in Boston, helping Sadie look at colleges. The next day he’ll go to the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards with his daughters who will watch him receive the King of Comedy Award and submit to the inevitable sliming.
“He came and fake buddied up with us,” says David Spade, who was also in the cast. “We let him in on all these meetings and dinners, and he wrote a s---ty piece to get himself notoriety.”By then, Sandler had starred in “Billy Madison,” an instant entry into the teenage canon that debuted at No. 1 at the box office. It also got terrible reviews.It was one of the last times Sandler read what the critics had to say, good or bad.
Sandler did his first stand-up at 17 at an open mic in Boston. He didn’t realize you had to write material and remembers riffing about his family. At NYU, he became a club regular. At first, he struggled and sometimes even turned on the crowd, until some older comics told him yelling at the audience wasn’t a great strategy.
That personality captured Doug Herzog, then an MTV executive who would later launch “The Daily Show” and “South Park.” In 1987, Herzog had gone to a club to see another act as he scouted for MTV’s “Remote Control” game show. He ended up hiring Sandler, who was still living in his dorm. “At read-through, Adam would do an [Weekend] Update piece, like where he was a travel guide and the joke would be that he was just not doing what a travel guide is supposed to be doing,” says Robert Smigel, a writer on the show for eight years. “But he was delivering the information with a blissful idiot’s enthusiasm. And it was incredibly funny. And I just remember me and Conan [O’Brien] and the nerds — Greg Daniels and [Bob] Odenkirk — giggling uncontrollably in one corner of this room.
Canteen Boy, like so many of his ideas, was polarizing. But it was, in a way, a microcosm of Sandler’s time on SNL — the smug, self-assured grown-ups looking down on the goofy kid who was much smarter than they realized. By 1995, he had been at SNL for five seasons when Michaels talked with Sandler’s manager, Sandy Wernick. “Billy Madison” had come out a few months earlier. Wernick told Michaels that Sandler was filming “Happy Gilmore,” in which Sandler played a temperamental failed hockey player who joins the golf tour to save his grandmother from being evicted.
So when “Billy Madison” came out and was savaged by critics — Herlihy’s 84-year-old grandfather tried to comfort him after a Long Island Newsday writer compared the film to the horrors of Auschwitz — the gang jumped in a car and sneaked into theaters to watch audiences roar. He then branched out into more romantic comedies, including “50 First Dates” with Drew Barrymore and “Just Go With It” with Jennifer Aniston.
“There’s this rage and this deep sweetness to him,” says Josh Safdie. “And he’s the only person who could have expressed what made Howard lovable for us.”Jennifer Aniston, who has made three movies with Sandler, including the new Netflix adventure comedy “Murder Mystery 2,” remembers watching Sandler rhyme “deli” with “Arthur Fonzarelli” when he did “The Chanukah Song.”
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