Middle-School Humor Meets Elder Statesman in Adam Sandler's 'Love You'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 28, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 28, 2024 |

In 2018, Adam Sandler released his stand-up special 100% Fresh, which I thought was a mediocre special salvaged by a spectacular song he played in tribute to Chris Farley, which he reprised the next year when he hosted SNL for the first time since he and Farley had been fired. Sandler also included in that special a version of The Wedding Singer’s “Grow Old with You” that he devoted to his wife, Jackie Sandler.

Basically, 100% Fresh was 80 percent mediocre and 20 percent phenomenal (and as the first critic to give the special a less than stellar review, the film’s director tried to bully me into changing my review so that it could keep its then 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which still irritates me). Sandler’s latest special, Love You, essentially falls prey to the same issue. He ends it with a loving, funny, Sandleresque tribute to comedy — with “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-like shoutouts to all the best, ending with Farley and Norm MacDonald — that leaves a warm glow.

But it also doesn’t change the first hour.

Directed by Josh Safdie (one half of the Safdie Brothers), Love You is filmed on what Safdie specifically designed as “the worst venue ever,” a tiny theater that they grunged up to give it an old-school feel, replete with intentional technical errors to, ironically, provide it with some authenticity. They filmed six shows that were three hours apiece and edited the footage down to a “tight” 70 minutes. With 18 hours of footage, this is the best they could come up with?

Like most people, I adore Adam Sandler, mostly for his early movies but also because he’s become something of an elder statesman in the comedy world. He’s likable, he’s loyal, he’s sentimentally sweet, and he’s occasionally even very funny. In Love You, however, he mostly indulges in the middle-school dick jokes that made him famous in the first place, and that is fine. But he’s also pushing 60, and while I almost respect his refusal to turn the page on the kind of jokes written for 15-year-olds, they’re also beneath the figure that he has become.

It’s also decidedly old-school stand-up. He’s neither observational nor confessional. He tells dirty jokes, the kind that might begin with, “Did you hear the one about …” For almost the entire first hour, he alternates between dirty jokes and silly, nonsense songs that he seems to find funnier than most of his audience. And the show is not not funny — except when Rob Schneider does an extended Elvis Presley impression, when it is miserable — but it’s also not funny. It is blithe and occasionally amusing, and sometimes kind of gross in its juvenilia — there is an interminably long joke, for instance, about a guy covered in his own shit getting jerked off in an airport bathroom, if you really want to know the level of humor here. Or a joke about Sandler’s flaccid dick being mistaken for an erect one because he’d Botoxed all the wrinkles out.

But Sandler knows how to leave on a high note, which is what he did in his 2018 special and what he does again here. It doesn’t matter that the first hour is slapdash and mediocre. People are going to remember the song about comedy. And they should: It’s everything we love about Sandler, even if it really is just Sandler name-checking great comedians and comedies set to a sweet melody (but also, how dare he include Rob Schneider among those great comedians). The song will end up on YouTube, and it will go viral, and it will absolutely deserve it. But it doesn’t mean the rest of the comedy special is good.

If you want to watch a great comedy special from a New England Jew, watch Alex Edelman’s Just for Us on Max, which is perfect from the first minute until the last. It’s also the year’s best comedy special.