Has Adam Sandler taken Jerry Seinfeld's place in culture?
Adam Sandler has become the voice of America's tired dads, while Jerry Seinfeld became a rich hermit obsessed with cars and cereal. How did that happen?
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It feels embarrassing to admit while watching Adam Sandler’s delightful new comedy special, but admit it: there was a time not so long ago when you probably hated him. Adam Sandler was the death of culture! The avatar of the lowest-common denominator! It’s okay, I thought it too. Remember the South Park episode? “This summer, Adam Sandler shits in your eyes, ears, and mouth!”
I laughed. At the time, somewhere between I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Jack and Jill, it had the ring of truth to it. Adam Sandler sucked now, and we were getting old (the South Park episode in question was, in fact, titled “You’re Getting Old”).
It’s hard to remember now. Especially in the face of “Love You,” the Sandman’s new comedy special for Netflix (directed by Josh Safdie!), in which he bounces effortlessly between straightforward marriage humor (“Every Day I’m Muttering”) and absurdist riffs about meeting a genie who makes him wack a guy off in an airport bathroom in order to claim his three wishes. It’s an eclectic mix of bits, original songs, and technical hiccups, giving voice to the id of America’s Tired Dad.
How the fuck did this happen?
Adam Sandler is a near-billionaire. He has signed multiple quarter-billion dollar deals with Netflix, with releases including a family comedy about Sean Payton and Bountygate written by Sandler’s brother-in-law (who was also dating Payton’s daughter). Adam Sandler is a filthy rich super-celeb (literally last year’s highest-paid actor). We should hate him for trying to play the I-too-am-just-a-tired-dad card. Oh, are your wife and daughters being annoying? Buy them an island!
And yet. Something about Sandler’s undereye bags, his slouchy sweatpants, his dandruffy beard and crotchety muttering… he feels authentically washed. This near-billionaire is someone a concrete technician chugging a double-sized Monster energy drink in a desperate attempt to become alert before he arrives at the job site after a long night chasing his three kids around his starter home in a blighted suburb somewhere can somehow look at and think “Wow, it me.”
Partly that’s the old showbiz magic, of being charismatic and funny enough that you can seem relatable now matter what you’re actually like. And there’s a casual virtuosity to Sandler’s comedy that betrays how long he’s been doing this. The bit about the jack-off genie had me nearly doubled over, and it wasn’t because it had some big payoff. In fact, the punchline kind of sucked. Yet within the general structure, Sandler pulls an Aristocrats-esque trick, of stretching and stretching the material, well beyond its logical end point, until the stretching itself becomes the joke, almost a magic trick, where you wonder how long he can keep spinning plates. It produces a mixture of affection and awe, that he can pull off exhausted slob and comedic David Copperfield in the same special.
Again it feels worth reflecting on how we got here. Sitcoms always used to be about tired dads. Al Bundy, Homer Simpson, Tim the Tool Man Taylor, and then later Ray Romano and Kevin James, sandwiching a Seinfeld-Friends interregnum when we as a culture thought it might be funnier to watch single people on the make in New York City instead of tired dads living lives of quiet desperation.
Inasmuch as Seinfeld was more of a reaction, or a necessary counter-programming to the Tired Dad sitcom, basically every popular show requires us to think of the characters as our buddies in some way. The Jerry Seinfeld of Seinfeld was allowed his quirks — extreme cleanliness, shallowness, sneakers, constant smirking — but he and the other characters still spoke to the shallow, misanthropic parts of all of us. Even if he was decidedly his own deal (a single, semi-successful New York comedian who loved Saabs) he could still give voice to the petty indignities of modern living. A close talker? He was a close talker, Jerry!
These days, I can’t think about Jerry Seinfeld without hearing what Bobcat Goldthwait said about him in 1995:
“Here is this creepy Scientologist guy (dating) teenage girls - which I don’t care about one way or another,” he said. “What I find creepy is that people are convinced he lives in that apartment, and those are his wacky friends. They don’t like each other; they’re actors paid to pretend they like Jerry Seinfeld. He’s a weird guy. But everybody thinks he’s normal and I’m weird.”
Bobcat was being deliberately provocative a little bit, and has softened somewhat since then, or maybe just become more reflective (“I think [the root of it] was just because he was so condescending when I moved to LA”), but the basic truth of what he was saying back then seems more self-evident than ever. Seinfeld is a weird guy. Bobcat may have had personal reasons for saying it, but he figured it out before the rest of us.
This was, of course, probably always obvious to people who bothered paying attention. It seems to have come into sharper focus, even for the mainstream/normie/former casual Seinfeld viewer lately. Probably that’s because Seinfeld’s own Netflix effort this year, Unfrosted, felt like nothing so much as a collection of actors paid to pretend to they like Jerry Seinfeld.
Or at least, paid to indulge Jerry’s possibly unhealthy obsession with Pop Tarts. Those actors (Bill Burr, Kyle Mooney, Jim Gaffigan… to name just a few I liked) succeeded in that there were isolated moments of Unfrosted that were laugh-out-loud funny, but those were too few and far between to disguise the basic off-putting nature of the gesture. Seinfeld didn’t do himself any favors on Unfrosted’s press tour either, during which he blamed the decline in TV comedy on “political correctness and the extreme left” and expressed nostalgia for “dominant masculinity.” And that was when he didn’t have to defend his wife financing a gang of Israeli thugs.
“Weird” has become politically charged lately (with the expiration date on that diss rapidly approaching if it hasn’t already past), but with the benefit of hindsight it is hard not to note the similarity between Seinfeld and the standard knock on JD Vance: that even at his best, Seinfeld was always a weird guy trying hard to seem normal. (And thus a natural enemy then to Bobcat Goldthwait, a relatable guy trying his hardest to be weird).
The point of this isn’t to point out all of Seinfeld’s reactionary tendencies. He’s 70-year-old near-billionaire so it’s sort of fish in a barrel; it would be weirder if he didn’t have bad politics. Seinfeld just happens to be useful as a counter example because Adam Sandler occupies almost identical cultural real estate and yet doesn’t seem hopelessly out of touch and remote. Sandler is the relatable near-billionaire comedian!
And that’s not due to any perfect politics or image management on Sandler’s part. Hell, he even brought onstage sort-of-recently-redpilled culture warrior Rob Schneider during his special, just because they’re old buddies. I was reminded of when Sandler’s other buddy Allen Covert (the star of Grandma’s Boy) started publishing rightwing children’s books. (Covert did not appear in the special, unless I missed him). Schneider emerged from the wings dressed in white leather and sequins, performing a perfectly competent Elvis impression for an entirely straight rendition of “It’s Now Or Never.” It harkened back to the heyday of the Blues Brothers, when “comedy” was sometimes jokes and sometimes just a series of impressive things a performer could do. That was kind of the joke, letting a friend embarrass you out of obligation. Sandler’s is often the comedy of obligation.
Yet even in maintaining his friendships with kooks, Sandler comes off… again, sort of normal. Compare Sandler letting his buddy who just got booed offstage at a Republican fundraiser come out in his Elvis costume, just because, to, say, Jack Black, canceling an entire Tenacious D tour over the blowback from Kyle Gass’s Trump assassination joke. If you know how much I love Tenacious D you know how much it hurts my soul to criticize anything Jack Black does, but it’s unavoidable: JB throwing KG under the bus feels like movie star behavior. Adam Sandler throwing his buddy Rob a bone when he absolutely didn’t need to feels like everyday mensch stuff.
It helps that Sandler works blue. In between the classic humor about how aging parents are a burden, marriage is hard, and children are ungrateful, he can’t help but indulge the other things he genuinely finds funny, like finding his mom’s vibrator (“still warm”), the joy of a really good shit, or a sentient balloon whose greatest goal in life is to get eaten out. Seinfeld’s clean comedy, and really all clean comedy, feels phony by comparison; strictly a career move. Working clean can make even a homeless drifter feel like an aspiring CEO. There’s a natural authenticity to filth, and an inherent careerism to working clean. The filthy stuff speaks to the sick fuck in all of us, even coming from a billionaire. Shit, cum, death — those are the things that actually tie us together, not “family-friendly” comedy.