We’ve Reached Peak Prestige Adam Sandler
In Adam Sandler’s newest Netflix stand-up special Love You, the Uncut Gems and Jack and Jill star’s Safdie-Sandler era struggles under the massive weight of his many dick jokes.
Sandler’s first collaboration with the elite indie filmmaker Josh Safdie proved to be one of the most important projects of his career. When Uncut Gems premiered in 2019, it had been 17 years since Punch-Drunk Love last proved that The Sandman could pull off a more nuanced role than “man-child who yells a lot” in a film that’s more artistically ambitious than the average Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. The success of Uncut Gems led to a renaissance in Sandler’s non-family-film career as he went on to produce and star in more challenging projects in his pursuit of an Oscar nomination that continues to this day.
However, the change of direction within Sandler’s career that culminated in the release of his most conceptual comedy show earlier today started a year before the premiere of Uncut Gems, back when Sandler surprised stand-up fans with the sincere and sensitive comedy special Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh, which he famously closed with a touching song dedicated to his late friend and comedy legend Chris Farley.
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With Safdie directing Adam Sandler: Love You, Sandler’s newest hour is a marriage of the self-reflection from 100% Fresh and the metropolitan artistic sensibilities that Sandler has picked up in the last half-decade of his film career. Unfortunately, this special feels more like a confirmation that Sandler said everything he needed to get off his chest in his last sensitive stand-up special rather than a continuation of his comedic introspection, and the Safdie styling and cinematography does little more than dress up the winding, long-winded stories with a visage of intentionality that almost makes us think they won’t inevitably end with a penis or a butt.
Love You opens with an extended sequence of Sandler arriving at the show late and preparing to take the stage in a slightly stressful and refreshingly joke-light reimagining of the traditional stand-up intro. Safdie puts the audience in Sandler’s shoes as he’s mobbed by a crowd of fans and autograph dealers without aggrandizing his star, showing Sandler as disheveled, argumentative and apologetic in a way that feels authentic to his average, A-lister experiences with hordes of demanding strangers.
Safdie’s influence on the special is strongest in the many meta elements scattered throughout the show. A running theme in Love You is that the stage crew of Nocturne Theatre in Glendale, California, a cozy, intimate venue that seats 360 audience members, is completely inept and beset by technical issues at every turn. The stage has a hole in it where the keyboard of Sandler’s musical accompaniment falls through, and a stagehand has to cover it up with a lunch tray. The TV screens that are supposed to serve as Sandler’s audio/visual support run on Windows XP, and they crash with Clippy smiling at the audience from the lower-right corner. There’s a dog running around the room. Throughout the set, these staged mishaps serve mainly as distractions in between Sandler’s bits.
As for Sandler’s act itself, the set is a typical mixture of stories and original songs, both of which tend to tackle his family life and both suffer from a lack of editing as the runtimes wear the material thin. In both tale and tune, Sandler’s ability to end a bit with a killer button is as strong as ever, even though he resorts to bodily humor more often than not, but the long walk to get to punchlines like “My dog has a boner” or “My mom used my wife’s vibrator” is too often sluggish and uninteresting.
It’s almost like Sandler tried to turn Love You into a tribute to his other late, legendary friend Norm Macdonald and his signature long-windedness, just without the droll detachment that made the audience wonder whether the joke is on them.
The running bit about AV problems comes to a head at the conclusion of the show when, with Windows XP subdued and the visual aids once again functioning, Sandler sings a seven-minute love song dedicated to comedy itself, espousing its power to turn around a rough day and bring relief to hard lives. Slideshow clips and images of Chris Rock, Carol Burnett and The Marx Brothers punctuate Sandler’s point that comedy is one of life’s purest sources of joy during difficult times while he strums the guitar his dad bought for him when he was just 12 years old.
Mirroring the memorial song to Farley, this rock ballad feels far less personal than the closing number to 100% Fresh, and it caps off a much more general special than Safdie trappings would suggest. While Sandler’s ability to write a killer punchline has survived the many phases of his unmatched career, the artsy, vulnerable Sandler of the last five years seems like he's running out of novel concepts and sensitive self-expressions to continue surprising us like he did at the end of the last decade.
Still, Love You is at least a watchable alternative to other recent Netflix stand-up specials. I’d rather listen to Sandler sing a sad song about comedy than watch Matt Rife make his audience bring their own material.
