At the end love youAdam Sandler’s new Netflix special, he switches to a different register. After an hour of Sandler humor, with jokes about unwipeable poop, Botox treatments for the penis and the tragedy of ruining a nice day at Disneyland by missing the exit on the way home and screaming “Fucking cunt!”, Sandler switches to sincerity. It’s a mode the special actually works in the whole time—it actually drives Sandler’s entire comedic outlook—but generally it stays more subliminal, present but implicit. In the end, though, the goal is to punch you in the feels. After telling the crowd that he plays with a guitar his dad gave him when he was 12, Sandler launches into a song about why he does what he does. “You’re down, boy. Nobody there, boy. Head in your hands and pain, so much pain. How can you ever be yourself again?” he sings. “You know, it’s comedy.”
It’s almost too sweet to bear, too naked in its appeal to love and life and the healing power of a good dick joke. But love you is not only a long prelude to a thesis that laughter is the best medicine. It’s also a film directed by Josh Safdie, and it has classic Safdie-esque tension and barely contained chaos. love youSandler is a man plagued by trials, the center of a sloppy production that barely holds together. At any moment it feels like the whole thing could fall apart, and the combination of stress, sincerity and silliness makes love you so adorable. It’s like a train full of clowns and fake plastic poop, constantly flirting with derailment and finally reaching a destination full of love and sentimentality.
The beginning is pure Safdie. Sandler arrives at the venue in a car with a broken windshield, and from the moment the door opens, an onslaught of noise, pleas and stimuli breaks out, pulling Sandler in a dozen directions. Paparazzi chase him. The alley is full of people clamoring for autographs, including a kid holding what appear to be secret surveillance photos of Sandler’s real home. As he goes backstage, he realizes his opening act is a ventriloquist, and the crowd isn’t into that. He swaps sweatshirts with a random guy backstage because Sandler’s hoodie has coffee stains on it. Someone demands he pay 40 Happy Gilmore Jerseys for a good cause; he goes through about three of them before he’s led on stage. He just barely avoids being tripped up by a random dog as he walks down the stairs and video calls in to greet a security guard’s hospitalized son. It’s total chaos.
The chaos at the beginning is tautly strung, carefully filmed and scripted to seem like anarchy, but when Sandler finally takes the stage, the mishaps continue, and it becomes difficult to tell how much of this Sandler knew in advance. Three screens behind him are supposed to display visual aids throughout the set, but they’re fixed on a Windows desktop background, and a voice from the theater microphone system informs Sandler that they’re doing their best to fix the problem. Sandler begins his set, doing everything he can to shake off the absurdity of this beginning and the feeling that the whole thing is a ramshackle mess. But over the course of the next hour, there are constant interruptions. A piece of equipment falls through a hole in the stage. Two people in the audience get into a fight, and Sandler has to stop to defuse it. At one point, the dog he almost tripped over backstage runs into the audience, and Sandler pauses while everyone greets the dog (who is named Gary).
For comedians who achieve a certain level of cultural ubiquity, fame becomes a problem to be overcome in the work — an obstacle on the road to identification that must be named and, ideally, broken through, or a peak to be overcome again and again with bigger venues and over-the-top spectacles. But this is Sandler’s (and Safdie’s) version of a special about fame, and it’s more effective and poignant than Kevin Hart’s self-deprecating jokes about his in-house wood-fired pizza oven or Ellen DeGeneres’ attempt at palpable comedy about how much airplanes suck. Sure, you’re center stage, love you suggests. Sure, everyone is here to see you, and that’s an immense blessing, and ultimately you get to do this thing you desperately love and believe in so much it’s almost painful. But you’re also the key figure in a vast economic and creative ecosystem, and when things go wrong, success or failure depends on you. Sandler is just trying to keep everything moving. He’s trying not to be an asshole. And it’s worth it, because people might laugh at a disturbingly detailed dream joke about an anthropomorphized birthday balloon who wants Sandler to sexually satisfy it.
Sandler’s two opening jokes both invoke the idea that fame is something to be embraced and put behind you. One is about meeting a woman who has a Sandler tattoo on her calf. The other is about a friend coming up to Sandler while he’s eating grapes and telling him he’s changed. “‘Get lost, I’ve always liked grapes,'” Sandler tells the guy. But the other guy insists he doesn’t like this version of Sandler, and eventually storms out. “So he left, and I said to the guy who gave me the grapes, ‘What do you think? Do you think I’ve changed?'”
The rest of the hour tries to shake off that self-awareness. There are no sweaty attempts to describe his life in falsely universal terms by focusing on parenthood or marriage. When the observations are small or drift into the mundane, Sandler usually makes songs out of them, like one about how much time he spends doing chores while muttering to himself, or another full of Halloween sound effects that lists spooky things in everyday life, like driving with the sun in your eyes at 3 p.m. When the jokes aren’t musical, or when he’s embarking on a particularly long anecdote, they tend toward the surreal, like the awesome birthday balloon or another long joke about finding a genie who insists his current master is a real douchebag. (But even that one finds a little button about fame at the end.)
It’s typical Sandler material, treading on comfortable ground. It’s occasionally a little underdeveloped, often quite juvenile, and sometimes waxing lyrical about the oddities of modern life. The audience is present and tangible – in one joke, for example, Sandler picks a guy from the audience, shines a spotlight on him, and then sings a song about the guy who unsettles everyone by flying a drone over the beach. The audience seems to be rooting for him when, for no particular reason, Sandler brings his friend Rob Schneider onstage as an Elvis impersonator and sings “It’s Now or Never.”
But Sandler is still a man swimming against the tide, struggling to stay the course despite all the little things that keep going wrong, and it conveys a central idea that is hard to get across in a special in a way that feels authentic, especially for someone with Sandler’s level of fame. It’s not a glamorous job. It’s not always fun. It’s often surreal in very small, unexpected ways, like when Gary strolls onto the stage. And it’s also importantwhich Sandler conveys with absolute seriousness in his final song. As he lays out his thesis, this idea that comedy is the counterbalance to all the hardest things in life, the screens behind him that have been failing all this time finally start to work and play a montage of scenes from everything from Monty Python and the Holy Grail To SNL To Abbott and Costello To Bridesmaids. “You’re laughing so hard as you feel the pain fading away / All because Ace Ventura just talked to his ass / Yeah, the comedy,” he sings. Eventually, the song turns into a list of gratitude, thanking dozens of Sandler’s heroes, colleagues and friends, and ends with greetings to departed friends, including Chris Farley and Norm Macdonald.
Ultimately, love you works so well because it takes the opportunity to record a special to do more than just record a Sandler show. Its investment in sentimentality pays off more and more, because the entire performance was also a joke at his expense. He is so committed to the part that he is willing to be the prank victim on his own show. As with any great special, love you is a document of what’s going on inside Sandler’s head, but Safdie’s direction and cinematography make it a portrait of him, seen from the outside. He’s busy and exhausted, and he loves this job with a clarity that’s almost blinding.
