by Lindy West
Say that I am correct about this whole thing. If Grumpy Cat’s owners did, in fact, name their cat Tard, and then opted to respond transparently when called out, what’s the worst that could have happened? If they’d issued a sincere apology, renamed the cat, and made a charitable donation, would the public have stopped thinking the cat was cute? Would we have stopped buying mugs and calendars and bottled iced coffee? Even if they hadn’t done that—if they’d said, “Yeah, the cat’s name is Tard and we think it’s cool and we stand by it”—Tard would have been doing drop-in sets at the Comedy Cellar to standing ovations within a month.
If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living in the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.
We escape into home renovation shows because it’s easier to imagine an apolitical world where everyone can afford a house than it is to actually build that world. We gobble up cable news’ insistence that both sides of an argument are equally valid and South Park’s insistence that both sides are equally stupid, because taking a firm stand on anything opens us up to criticism. We live willingly within the lies constructed by abortion opponents, enforcing shame and stigma around a basic human freedom, because we’re afraid to say the word abortion out loud. We kept letting Adam Sandler make more movies after Little Nicky, because white men are allowed to fail spectacularly and keep their jobs.
We cannot protect women from intimate partner violence until we stop treating battered wives as discrete hourlong plotlines instead of interconnected points on a millennia-long continuum. We cannot achieve racial equality until we stop giving twenty-two-year-old male comedians who believe in “reverse racism” as much credence in the “discourse” as we give black scholars and academics. We can’t save ourselves until we get comfortable with discomfort. The truth hurts. But the future we’re building without it will hurt more.
Is Adam Sandler Funny?
I turned thirty-seven right in the midst of a series of intense deadlines—aka the “Watching ‘Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ Boss Fight Tutorial Videos on YouTube and Justifying It ‘Because I’m Eating’” phase of the writing process, a technique I’m sure you’re all familiar with from J. D. Salinger: A Life—which meant that I could not spare one spring second for joy, cake, sunshine, or friendship on the official first day of my late thirties (knife emoji, skull emoji, coffin emoji).
Instead of partying, I had to figure out a way to get some work done in a slightly more celebratory style than my usual routine, which is, obviously, hunching over a laptop going positively rodential on a jumbo bag of dill pickle–flavored sunflower seeds with my chin resting on an upside-down Coke Zero bottle I’ve wedged into my cleavage. Does that sound like a birthday girl to you? Does it even sound, technically, like a Homo sapien?
For my DIY Take Your Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Rat-Woman to Work Day, I really snazzed it up. I took a hot shower and put on my coziest jammies. My husband made me a jalapeño bagel with cream cheese, tomato, and cayenne (SEND ME $1,000 FOR THIS BITCHING HACK). I swaddled myself in the number one couch blanket and refused to share it with my shivering family. My mom brought over a coconut crème pie and my gift: three canisters of pepper spray, because in this wild freelance writer’s life, a lot can happen between the bed and the toilet and the other toilet and back to the bed. And I did something I’d been putting off for months, the very last piece in a very important part of this book:
I watched Little Nicky.
“Is Adam Sandler Funny?” was the very first chapter I conceived of for this book, years ago now, after I stumbled across Billy Madison on cable and found it absolutely baffling. Was this really the thing we had worshipped all those years? Why does a grown woman want to fuck a man who goes to kindergarten and talks like a baby? Am I hallucinating, or are there no jokes in this at all?
My intention was to watch every single Adam Sandler movie ever made—or at least the Adam Sandler Adam Sandler movies, if you know what I mean. The ones where Adam Sandler does the voice and Adam Sandler’s friends are played by those three dudes who are always in Adam Sandler movies (Allen Covert, Peter Dante, and Jonathan Loughran, if you want to look them up and go, “Oh, yeah, those guys”) and Rob Schneider plays some sort of bewildered ethnic clown. Usually a Dennis Dugan joint with a Dennis Dugan cameo.
I was genuinely curious about what I’d find. Billy Madison is considered one of the true Sandler classics—I had fond enough memories of it from my youth—but rewatching it, I just couldn’t connect. Perhaps it’s an inevitable by-product of time and perspective: it’s hard to laugh at Sandler as an adult woman when you’re suddenly, painfully aware of how he helped shape the adult men around you.
I didn’t actually manage to watch or rewatch every Adam Sandler movie. I didn’t get to Mr. Deeds, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, Click, Grown Ups, Grown Ups 2, Blended, Pixels, The Ridiculous 6, The Do-over, or any of Sandler’s new Netflix content. Which sounds like a big lapse, until you consider that I did watch Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jack and Jill, and That’s My Boy, which you haven’t even heard of, and I listened to Sandler’s multiplatinum 1993 comedy album They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! in its entirety, AND it turns out I can still recite most of “Fatty McGee” from memory, from back when I used to think it was important to signal to people that it was okay to make fun of fat people around me because I’m the cool kind of fat person who knows I deserve shame.
So if you are tempted to pooh-pooh my expertise in matters of Sandler, kindly refer above to the part where I said I WATCHED LITTLE NICKY ON MY BIRTHDAY.
I was a little Saturday Night Live freak growing up. I recorded it off the TV and watched the tapes until they wore out, committing even the most middling, now-forgotten sketches to memory. I can’t isolate now how I felt about Sandler then, because that wasn’t how it worked. I loved comedy, and so I loved Sandler.1 He was part of a whole, a big, important part. I couldn’t separate him from whatever alchemy made SNL so special any more than I could separate my head from my neck.
When Sandler left SNL and started making movies, I followed, along with the rest of the world. But, in hindsight, a part of me always felt that those movies weren’t for me. I never connected with them in quite the same way as my male peers did. I found parts to love, anyway, and jokes to quote, and I pored over the IMDb pages until I knew every bit actor, because what else was I going to do? I loved comedy. I didn’t think about it at the time, but there was no Adam Sandler for girls—no one making blockbuster comedies about girls having fun and being gross, no one telling us that we were good the way we were and the joke was on the rest of the world. We took what we could get.
My curiosity flared when I flipped past Billy Madison that day, so many years later, and thought—wait, do I hate this? Is this why men my age don’t know how to fold laundry? Is this why I once cried over a man with a handlebar mustache who slept on a bare mattress in an unfinished basement?
Here commences the results section of my study. (I do want to issue one caveat, which is that Steve Buscemi is an angel in every single one of these movies, even the ones in which he does not appear.)
Happy Gilmore (1996)
The golf one. Adam Sandler is an ice hockey player whose only talent is using his impotent rage to hit the puck really really extremely hard. He gets fired from hockey and decides to try golf. Surprise! Turns out he’s the greatest golfer alive! He beats the shit out of Bob Barker, and then in the end he wins one golf jacket and one Julie Bowen.
Billy Madison (1995)
Adam Sandler goes back to elementary school and fucks his hot adult teacher even though he pisses his pants and talks in a baby voice and all his friends are four. He is the best at Academic Decathlon. Surprise.
Little Nicky (2000)
Little Nicky starts with Jon Lovitz, orange, sitting on a tree limb watching a woman undress through her bedroom window. At first I thought, “Oh, I see, he must be a lil devil from Hell who came up to Earth to be DIRTY,” because I knew vaguely that the movie was about devils and the man is brightly illuminated and eating fried chicken out of a picnic basket balanced precariously in a tree and talking at full volume about a mom’s jugs while she is like two feet away. But then the mom spies him and screams, and Jon Lovitz falls out of the tree and dies and goes to Hell. He was just a mortal peeper all along! A hilarious, hilarious sex criminal.
In hell, to pay for his penis crime, Satan sentences Lovitz to be raped eternally by a giant bird. Ever notice how men’s idea of Hell is always rape? (Man, wait till they hear about Earth!) Other punishments meted out by Little Nicky’s Satan: Adolf Hitler—dressed as a French maid, because aren’t women’s clothes humiliating?—has a pineapple shoved up his asshole every day. Satan gets mad at his butler, Kevin Nealon, and makes Kevin Nealon grow tits on his head, because women’s anatomy is humiliating, and then Kevin Nealon has to get raped by Rodney Dangerfield every day because of his tit head! Men’s Hell is to be a woman.
Nicky is the youngest son of Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel, the Devil, who is getting ready to retire and trying to decide which of his evil children should inherit his bad kingdom. But instead he’s like “SIKE, you all suck” and decides to stay the Devil for another ten thousand years. This causes his two terrible sons to sneak out of Hell to go and make their own Hell on Earth. It falls to Nicky—despite the fact that he is, for all practical purposes, a dead snail—to go up top and try to stop them.
A major engine of comedy in Little Nicky is Nicky’s culture shock upon arriving in New York City, because he does not know about common Earth things such as infrastructure, food, and money. For instance, after being hit by a train and waking up back in Hell, he says, “I got killed by this big light that was attached to a lot of metal,” but then later he says (about something unrelated), “I’ll have to take a mulligan on this one.” You know what a mulligan is but you don’t know what a train is? You don’t know what a bus is but you understand the sentence “Your father gave me some deposit money for a place on the Upper East Side, but I misplaced it”? I hate you!
It turns out that the only way Nicky can save both Earth and Hell from his demon brothers is to harness the power of his seething, repressed, hellish anger. A good message, especially for boys! Nicky has no discernible skills, intellect, charisma, sense of humor, ambition, kindness, or personality, but he manages to skate by just well enough to get literally everything he wants. At the end, he fucks Patricia Arquette and beats the entire Harlem Globetrotters at one-on-one.
The Wedding Singer (1998)
Some people think of The Wedding Singer as one of the better Adam Sandler films, and I used to too, but HOLY MOLY, were women not allowed to break up with men in the nineties! “When I think of you, Linda,” Sandler famously sings of his ex, “I hope you fucking choke.” Sandler plays a wedding singer who, quelle surprise, actually deserved to be a rock star. Drew Barrymore is precious, and Alexis Arquette deserved better from this world, but I wish every man in my generation hadn’t been taught that it is well and good to wish death upon women who leave you. Counterpoint: Women have free will! Bye!
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008)
I feel as though this movie puts a lot of faith in Americans’ awareness of Israeli stereotypes. Is it common knowledge that Mossad agents really really love hacky-sack? Regardless, Adam Sandler is the best at it, and fighting, and hair.
Big Daddy (1999)
This is the other one everyone remembers as pretty good. But somehow we don’t remember that the big joke of this movie is “What if a MAN had to do the stuff that WOMEN do!?!??!?” Adam Sandler takes in (kidnaps) a small child and teaches him how to piss in public, cause Rollerbladers mortal injury, and brutally degrade Leslie Mann for working at Hooters while putting herself through law school. Just when you think Sandler might not be the best at something in one of his movies, a supporting character who is a lawyer mentions something about a tough case and Sandler says, “You could always sue them under the corrupt standards and practices act,” and everyone is blown away because it turns out that he is the greatest lawyer on Earth even though he works in a tollbooth.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007)
Glaringly homophobic even when it came out, a time when it was still socially acceptable to call shirts “f*ggy” for being pink.
Jack and Jill (2011)
Jack (Sandler), the most brilliant and revolutionary advertising executive ever to trod ’pon Gaia’s green crust, has to impersonate his annoying twin sister, Jill (also Sandler), so that he can use her carnal magnetism to trick Al Pacino (as himself) into rapping in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. That is the real plot.
That’s My Boy (2012)
I didn’t even know that That’s My Boy existed, and it was not on my list for this project until I accidentally came across it while flipping channels (yes, I have regular cable like a MOLDERING CORPSE) and was captivated. A light romp inspired by the foibles of famous child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau,2 That’s My Boy is the story of a boy (Adam Sandler) who fathers a child (Andy Samberg) with one of his middle school teachers, then proceeds to name the baby Han Solo, give it a large tattoo, and, on account of being twelve, is surprisingly just not that good of a dad in general. After years of estrangement, Sandler shows up at the now grown-up Samberg’s wedding, pretending to miss his boy but actually perpetrating a wicked scheme to obtain $50 grand from a tabloid and thereby avoid debtor’s prison.
In the end, it’s all fine because it turns out that Samberg’s fiancée is fucking her own brother and then a big fat man named Tubby Tuke, whom Sandler had bet on as a joke, accidentally wins the Boston Marathon. Adam Sandler goes back to banging grannies and basically being a professional baseball player. A classic American tale.
The Waterboy (1998)
Sandler is Bobby Boucher, a “socially inept” waterboy with extreme anger problems (again), who you think is only going to be the best at knowing about water but also turns out to be the strongest and fastest linebacker of all time. Even though he is “socially inept,” Fairuza Balk wants to eat that ass like a dog on a litter box. Then the Mud Dogs win the Bourbon Bowl and Bobby is MVP and it is strongly implied that he drops out of college to join the NFL. Kathy Bates does her best.
I have managed to scientifically isolate the seven essential components of any classic Adam Sandler movie:
1. Adam Sandler seems like he’s the boy who’s kind of a loser, BUT WEALLY HE’S DA BEST BOY and it’s the wesponsible guy who’s BAD!
2. Adam Sandler talks in a funny voice and/or is a simpleton of unknown provenance.
3. Adam Sandler has severe anger problems, which benefit him.
4. Adam Sandler seems like just a generic dork, but secretly he is the strongest and best at a sport or trade.
5. Adam Sandler urinates in public.
6. Adam Sandler behaves as a giant baby would behave.
7. Adam Sandler is a deeply, deeply unappealing creature, a true bare-minimum kind of human, yet a beautiful woman is hornily drawn to him and yearns to be his bride.
There’s a lot of bad in here—women as door prizes for male growth, women lusting ravenously after men who offer them nothing, women shamed for their sexuality, women punished for rejecting men, women forever on the margins. It is so normal for white men to fail upward that it skews our perception of what is good. Can you imagine if Ellen Cleghorne had made a Little Nicky? You think she’d get to make seventy-seven more movies after that? You think she’d get to make one?
I assumed that this chapter would deliver me to some big fat feminist dunk about how Adam Sandler movies indoctrinated a generation of boys into the notion that the world was theirs for the taking whether they bothered to grow up or try hard or do a good job or n
ot. Any random shithead can be the best at a sport, without training or dedication. A woman is a thing you get, not a person you get to know.
And I’m sure that message did filter into the collective subconscious of my generation’s boys to some degree, perhaps to all of our detriment. I mean, look at the world around us. But it can also be true that Sandler was a product of his time, reflecting the values of his time, just trying to make people laugh in the parlance of his time. The notion that men are the center of the world and women are supporting characters was certainly not invented in 1998. For me, I guess, the crux lies less in the movies themselves and more in the emptiness around them. I don’t begrudge the straight white boys their abundance; I just wish the rest of us had had the same.
In the last few weeks of writing this book, while I was living in New York and simultaneously working on season two of Shrill the show, sweet Aidy Bryant offered me tickets to an SNL taping. The host, by pure coincidence, through some spasm of divinity that I don’t believe in but clearly should, was Adam Sandler.
And, man, I fucking cried! I cried my ass off.
The episode had an emotional charge from the start. It wasn’t just me; from my seat I could see SNL cast members crying, too, hugging each other in the wings, thinking, maybe, about where they had come from and what lay ahead. It was out of nostalgia partially for Sandler himself—I am more attached to him than I’d thought—and partially for the legacy of his era, for the sense memory of being young, for the years when you can love things so purely without complication. It was watching Sandler, fifty-two, tired, process his return to an old home, where he himself had once been young, in a time when it must have felt as though everything was happening for him, finally, and Chris Farley was still alive. I didn’t even mind that he did Opera Man.3
