What makes adam sandler so funny

Fans genuinely find Adam Sandler funny and love his style of comedy. Movies and genre, after all, are subjective. Adam Sandler fans have bought in to his sense of humor and love every second of it. Usually Adam Sandler's comedies feature a dumb, juvenile and lazy protagonist committing all kinds of wild hijinks while trying to overcome an obstacle that seems way over his head, but ultimately teaches him a valuable lesson.

Sometimes Sandler plays someone who gets aggressively angry, like in Happy Gilmore and Anger Management. He also likes writing over-the-top caricatures and stereotypes i. The Waterboy that act as a catalyst for comedy. While his fans eat this childish humor up, critics are put off by it.

They also frequently cite his obnoxious, raunchy, offensive and lowbrow humor as the reason his movies are so bad, finding it old, tired and boring. Adam Sandler started basking in the spotlight during his time on Saturday Night Live from to , where he wrote and performed comedy. By and large, younger fans often point back to these early movies as what made them loyal fans. Nostalgia is a powerful force. All you have to do is look at Star Wars fans to figure that out.

So for Adam Sandler fans, watching his new movies brings them back to when they watched his early movies for the first time. Again, they think his dumb, juvenile and silly comedy is funny. They have no problem investing in it and enjoy watching it. They go in knowing what his movies are going to be and are totally OK with it.

More often than not, they like to keep the bar high, especially if other competing comedies have set a standard for the genre. This is why his comedies might not sit so nicely with critics. Though Barrymore originally found the script and sent it to Sandler, saying it should be their next movie together, Sandler rewrote the drama into, well, an Adam Sandler movie.

Love is no longer a thing you work toward but something you work at. Sure, it sounds cheesy, but Adam Sandler is cheesy.

Through SNL which is like clown-finding bootcamp and his albums, Sandler had a good sense of who he was by the time he made Billy Madison. In basically every movie that follows, Sandler would expand upon his comedic rage, but in Gilmore it is front and center. And while Sandler is clearly not totally comfortable on-camera yet, he is at least a present and compelling to watch. There is, however, more to it. This moment, though not the most iconic scene in a particularly quotable movie, is a bit of a Rosetta stone for understanding the characters Sandler plays.

But it also deepens him. Happy grows up relatively little for a Sandler character, with him not learning to not be angry anymore but rather to control it long enough to play golf. Sandler became a better actor right after Happy Gilmore.

He just needed a movie where he could get it all out. Adam Sandler had to turn down a role in Inglourious Basterds , playing the Bear Jew, because he was already committed to shooting Funny People. What Sandler got instead was the chance to work with a director who really knows him.

To his credit, if you read interviews with the more auteur-leaning directors he once worked with, you get a sense that Sandler works hard, listens to direction, and trusts his collaborators fully. Apatow just knew what Sandler could do, and the result is one of the richest performances of his career.

What performance? The irony being that that very feeling is proof of how good Sandler is in this movie. Similarly, some people saw Funny People as a rare bit of self-awareness from Sandler, showing that he also knows his movies suck.

Yes, there was a degree of self-awareness here, but of a different sort. Anyway, the point is they are different. But what is exceptional here is how Sandler and Apatow pull from their real lives to give the performance verisimilitude. To achieve this, the smartest decision Apatow made was having him do stand-up — like really do it in front of real audiences, not just shoot some cutaways and add the laughs in post. In the same way that in Punch-Drunk Love , Paul Thomas Anderson, as a great filmmaker, is able to convey to the audience what it was like for him to fall in love with Adam Sandler as an actor, watching Funny People you feel how Apatow felt when he would see Adam Sandler do stand-up when they were coming up together.

He seems more vulnerable, more present, more connected. Not only was Sandler not really doing stand-up before shooting Funny People , he admitted being nervous about sharing that side of himself with his audience. For followers of his work, it was just so exciting to get to see more of him, to get to fill out the picture of who he is and the character he has been playing. Sandler masters Dad-Adam in one of his most ambitious pictures. There seems to be a perception that they are the tossed-off victory lap of a washed up, finally failed movie star.

However, apparently another legendary director was the touchstone. Director Robert Smigel, who co-wrote the movie with Sandler, is quite cute talking to the L. He wanted it to feel like a naturalistic ensemble movie, and we even talked about directors like [John] Cassavetes. The Week Of is the purest essence of the new older Adam Sandler, and the result is the most understated, naturalistic film in the Happy Madison—verse.

And in terms of pathos, Sandler brings more than he has in any movie of his own movies since Click. In many ways, The Week Of is a fully formed vision of late-career Sandler. Sandler has slowly but ever increasingly moved from playing to man-children to dads. Not dad-children; just dads. Dads that are equal parts sweet and heavyhearted. Dads just trying to do their best and, in turn, failing at it for laughs for the first two acts.

And all of this went into The Week Of. Similarly, how his movies are produced reflect the themes of the movies themselves. From looking at his work, from the point he married Jacqueline Titone in and especially after they started having kids, the only thing Sandler seemed more driven and inspired by than friends is family.

Also, as the Times profile noted, he created a schedule to take and pick up his children from school. Onscreen, his characters have had to figure out how to reconcile the men that they are with their duties as a husband and father. Providing became a prominent theme — not just about the anxiety to make enough money to give your kids a good life, but also the anxiety of giving them too much.

Adam Sandler at his funniest. After, earlier that year, Wedding Singer proved that Sandler could be a leading man, The Waterboy proved he was a movie star. Which is a lot! For the most part, this was likely just the result of a fan base slowly building, especially with Happy and Madison getting heavy cable rotation, but the movie also just had the most amount of Adam Sandler comedy.

Also, although Bobby is a heightened character, his arc, which is a bit of a fusion between Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore , feels like the platonic ideal of a Sandlererian how-to-be-a-grown-up narrative. Ultimately, where his previous films felt like Sandler figuring out how to do his thing, here he was at full strength, with a fully realized clown. I have to work with this person. What you see is a bit of a breakthrough in terms of his man-child character, resulting in something more psychologically damaged, something more needy.

Many Sandler movies follow an arc not like an episode of Queer Eye : A young man is stuck and needs the help of an outside force to understand what it means to be a man. Why Big Daddy works so well is because that outside force is an actual child. But Sandler often plays an adult who lives like a kid between the ages of 9 and Big Daddy , the first movie where he has a kid, shows how fun Sandler than can be relating to someone who is the age he acts.

In that way, Big Daddy predicted the parts Sandler would go on to play later in his career. Sandler tries to show his generation how to grow up. That assumption was then confirmed to him by the reviews for Happy Gilmore and almost all of his subsequent movies. And even in those, Sandler leans toward soft-spoken and humble or, at most, just one of the guys. This is often in contrast to the female characters, who tend to be put together professionally and emotionally. No, Billy Madison and, in turn, the rest of his movies affirm certain conventional orthodoxies: go to school, have a career, have a family.

Executed with a Sandlerian simplicity, his movies often play like kids movies for adolescent or stuck-in-adolescence men, providing them an easily digestible lesson on how to live. Billy Madison was the first of these movies and its purest distillation.

His exuberance was infectious, and still is all these years later. More like BOREophyll. Sure, it captures how immature and un-self-aware the character is at this point, but also it captures just how much fun Sandler is having.

Rose asked PTA what inspired the film. Punch-Drunk Love is a love letter from someone with a deep Sandler fandom. Side note: In that same Rose interview, Anderson mentioned that he and Jonathan Demme are in competition for who is a bigger Adam Sandler fan. The elements are there: Man-child, failing to thrive; a more emotionally mature albeit underwritten love interest who helps give him something to shoot for; a scheme that helps push him toward maturity; daddy issues; a bully.

This is not to say you can see Sandler acting. Anderson asked Sandler to take what he was already doing and just push it — be more raw, be more vulnerable. His sweetness became more shy. His temper, while still funny, became a bit more scary. His self-loathing became full-on clinical depression. In total, you get to see Sandler figure out how to become a much more internal actor. Watch how all the traits we associate with a Sandler character play on his face in this scene, only to explode at the end:.

I considered not putting Punch-Drunk Love so high because of how it so quickly became weaponized against Sandler.

For a certain sort of critic and critically minded viewer, with every new Sandler movie, Punch-Drunk Love would be pointed to as an exception. Either Sandler could make great work but cynically chooses not to in order to make more money, or Sandler is a talentless oaf who somehow was able to achieve something actually good with the help of a visionary director. I, especially after watching his films in order, see it a bit differently.

This list is partly about how Sandler chose a career in which — unlike, say, Jim Carrey or Will Ferrell — he almost exclusively plays variations of the same core person. Because it happens in real time, for some fans, what we learn lingers with each project that follows. When you watch the Sandler movies that come afterward, regardless of their quality, they are all made a bit better knowing that, the Punch-Drunk Love character lives inside there as well.

Have you watched The OA? Esssssssssssentially, characters travel in between dimensions, landing in the body of whoever they are in that existence; sometimes they have similar backgrounds, sometimes they do not.

And when you jump into this new version of you, you are both yourself and the version of you whose body it is. When zoomed out, the result is a portrayal not of a collection of similar characters but the total soul of the archetype. Adam finds his equal and a more mature version of himself. When Adam Sandler appeared on Norm Macdonald Live , the host posited a theory about why Sandler and Drew Barrymore were so good in romantic comedies together. Sandler and Barrymore share a similar childlike innocence that can be very useful for this particular genre.

When Sandler and Barrymore fall for each other, no matter how old their characters are in the given movie, it feels like young love. It helps, of course, that Barrymore is great and is given a ton to do.

When you watch those three breakout films in a row, Wedding Singer feels like the fully evolved form. Even the way the character grows up feels more complicated, more subtle. I remember going to see The Wedding Singer in the theaters, as a bit of a relief from the pressures of studying for my bar mitzvah. Of course, I was excited.

This was an Adam Sandler movie! You watch every Adam Sandler movie and there is a clear value system. And Wedding Singer , when judged by that measurement, comes up a tiny bit short. And a subtle lesson about what it means to be a grown up? Sandler movies are about a clear takeaway. So, if you want to see Adam Sandler take some of these same themes and really make a big show it, well, do I have a movie for you ….

Since I have to imagine you are probably reading this first, let me use this as an opportunity to explain what I was trying to do, and maybe make a case for Click in the process. The latter would suggest a universal idea of what is good and bad.

If you watch every Adam Sandler movie in order, you start developing a schema of what defines these set of films. That movie … is … Click. This moment of him playing with the remote, trying to give himself a tan, is one of the ten funniest performed scenes of his filmography:. Rob Schneider is also in it, doing what he does in these movies. Besides Sandler and Kate Beckinsale having some of the better chemistry of his career, the script allows them to play a lot of interesting notes, as their marriage devolves with each time jump.

The moments between Sandler and Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner as his parents is genuinely lovely and poignant. In fact, Click features probably the saddest scene from his entire career, which Sandler is incredible in:.

For some, the sad parts of this movie were cheap and manipulative, but just like his comedy, Sandler likes his emotions big. This is schmaltz and, like its namesake food stuff, if you have a taste for it, this can bring you to tears. The movie is a midpoint between man-child-needing-to-grow-up Sandler and just-trying-to-be-a-good-dad Sandler, and that ties directly to the lesson his character learns.

When you look at the Happy Madison movies that follow Click , you see a period of uncertainty, which include a lot of the worst movies of his career, followed by him settling into his late-career dad archetype. Besides Sandler saying he pulled from recently losing his own father for the performance, it was also shot on the eve of him turning 40, with his wife was expecting their first child. I do it. It feels like a relief, and if I think I did the best I could do, I feel a huge sense of accomplishment.

I read it as him saying that he wants to make sure he enjoys making movies. Making Click , Sandler learned the lesson his character does — for better or worse. It was released as a Rated R movie but edited down before its release. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Can rollercoasters go underground? Some critics say that it's a return to the Sandler we remember from the early 90s.

Others say that it's finally the mature Sandler we've been waiting for. But maybe it's just a delightful high point in a wildly inconsistent career. Maybe we're uselessly arguing shampoo versus conditioner. Here's what we do know, though, beyond a doubt: his new special is genuinely funny, from start to finish. Yes, he still does the weird baby voice. Yes, he still plays extremely silly songs. Yes, even in his early 50s, he is as immature as ever one of the special's highlights is a duet he performs with Rob Schneider, which is about astronauts who 69 in zero gravity.

What's changed? Sandler seems totally at peace and at ease on stage — which during the hour varies between small clubs and huge teeming theaters — and he seems to be completely, sincerely having fun with his art, even laughing at his own jokes at times, but in an utterly likable way. His material is a mix of classic joke-telling, surreal flights of fancy, and quick observational humor. Another stand-out moment, his song "Phone, Keys, Wallet," mixes all three.

His film, Funny People , even has him playing a character who seems based on himself, who is totally aware that he makes crap.

Whether it's money, or a bad habit of working with less-funny friends, or a simple inability to curate, it's tough to tell.

Still, he seems deeply human in this new special, and creating the good along with the bad seems deeply human too — it's just that he does both at such extremes that it can be confusing. There's one moment at the very end of the special where Sandler sings a surprisingly sincere ballad, "Growing Old With You," to his wife of 15 years, actress Jacqueline Titone.