“I’m not sure he would like that”: Is one man to blame for Adam Sandler’s awful comedy?
To some people, Adam Sandler’s juvenile japery is the very height of modern comedy, while to others, it makes them want to claw their own eyes out.
Personally, I think I fall somewhere left of middle when it comes to the Sandman. I like a couple of his comedies, such as Happy Gilmore and Anger Management, but haven’t kept up with many of the dismal ones he’s been farting out on Netflix for the past decade. Too often, he does seem to resort to funny-voiced buffoonery that is 15% amusing, 85% cringeworthy, when it’s obvious that he’s actually a talented actor who is capable of so much more. See: Uncut Gems, Hustle, Punch-Drunk Love.
Here’s the thing, though: according to the one man most responsible for shaping (or at least encouraging) Sandler’s sophomoric comedy stylings, I’m part of the problem, and his naysayers have always missed the true genius at play. Indeed, dissenting voices who dismiss Sandler for making lowest common denominator comedy have been around since the very start of his career. However, Jim Downey insisted they were wrong, right from the beginning.
Downey first joined Saturday Night Live as a writer in 1976, and wound up writing for the show off and on for 30 years. This made him the longest tenured scribe in the iconic sketch comedy show’s history, and meant he worked with nearly all the biggest names to come through Studio 8H’s doors. When he wrote sketches with Sandler, though, who cut his teeth on SNL between 1990 and 1995, he saw a one-of-a-kind comedic voice that did things differently than all his peers. By and large, he believed most comedians were desperate to prove how fiercely intelligent they were. Sandler, though? He couldn’t have cared less, but that didn’t make him dumb.
“Adam was a guy who did not care if you thought he was smart and, in fact, went out of the way to obscure the fact that he is, I’d daresay, a lot more intelligent than 90% of the performers I’ve worked with,” Downey told The Washington Post in 2023. To him, Sandler’s greatest talent was taking a sophisticated idea or a technically innovative sketch and running it through his silly-voiced, man-child delivery system. Indeed, fellow writer Robert Smigel claimed Sandler was one of the only performers at SNL who was “reinventing sketch structure” instead of relying on the tried-and-tested formula of a simple premise that escalates in ridiculousness.
Unfortunately, while Sandler was hugely successful at SNL, just like in his movie career, there was always a core of people who hated everything he did. Downey’s theory was always that ordinary, blue-collar folks had no beef with Sandler, and neither did the intelligentsia. Instead, it was a middle group of armchair intellectuals who would “take great offense at this kind of thing. They thought it was self-indulgent and infantile.”
Was Downey correct in that assessment? Maybe. Maybe not. But the support he gave Sandler was instrumental in forming the controversial comedy megastar he would become. “Downey taught us our taste,” Sandler stated of his mentor in Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “I’m not sure if he would like that, all the bad reviews I get, but I think I’m doing stuff that Downey would like.”
Heartwarmingly, Downey did indeed appreciate Sandler’s smarter-than-it-appears comedy so much that he agreed to make one of his few on-screen appearances in one of his breakthrough movies. In Billy Madison, he is the Principal judging the academic decathlon who delivers a memorably harsh monologue to the loveable doofus after a particularly shambolic answer: “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
