Pre-Fame Roomies Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler Were Obsessed with Prank Phone Calls
Two of the world’s biggest comedy stars shared a crummy apartment before either of them hit it big. “Adam Sandler was my roommate back before he was on Saturday Night Live,” Judd Apatow once told Howard Stern. “We were just starting out as comics. We lived in the valley in North Hollywood together. We were right at the moment where we were trying to figure out how we were going to break through, and it was just so clear that Adam was a 100,000 times funnier than I was.”
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Why was Apatow so convinced about Sandler’s comic abilities? One clue was the prank phone calls that the future Happy Gilmore star would make in their apartment. “Sandler had so much energy to make comedy,” remembered Apatow. “He didn’t know what to do with it. It was just coming out of his ears all day long so he was obsessively making phony phone calls as just a way to amuse himself and others.”
Stern, a connoisseur of phony phone calls himself, wanted to know more. Sandler would call a credit card company, Apatow offered as an example, “and he would act like someone whose credit card just got stolen in a very violent robbery. He knew that they wouldn’t hang up if he was explaining a violent confrontation, and he would just go (in a silly Sandler voice), ‘You’re walking down the street and you’re having a nice day and the next thing that happens, you have a fucking gun in your mouth!’”
The poor customer service rep would ask for the credit card number. Again, the outraged idiot voice: “I don’t know, they fucking stole it from me, I don’t know!’”
Sandler also would use his “They’re all going to laugh at you!” voice to call comedy clubs and complain about the previous night’s act, especially if they were a prop comic: “The comedian said that my husband had no cock! My husband has a cock! We were on vacation and we’re trying to enjoy California, and we did not want to be insulted by some Jewish comedian!”
Apatow knew that he was witnessing comedy gold, so he began recording the calls — first on audio tapes, later on video, he told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast.
“When we were doing Funny People, I found hours of Adam Sandler making phone calls,” Apatow said. “He was always calling Jerry’s Deli and complaining about the roast beef and saying that it made him sick. And they would always be so nice, and then he would be, you know, an old lady and he would negotiate getting a free sandwich. It was always like, ‘Could I get a free sandwich for my trouble?’ And they would say okay. And he would say, ‘Well, I had turkey but I don’t want to get hurt again, this time could I get the roast beef?’
“He would keep them on the line for 20 minutes, negotiating a sandwich. As a comedy nerd, I knew: That’s the guy. Adam’s going to hit. There’s no way this doesn’t happen. He just delighted us. He made us laugh so hard.”
