At the end of Love You, Adam Sandler’s new Netflix special, he moves into a different register. After an hour of Sandlerian humor, with jokes about no-wipe poops, Botoxing your dick, and the tragedy of ruining a lovely day at Disneyland by missing the exit on the way home and yelling “Fucking cunt!”, Sandler modulates into sincerity. It’s a mode the special’s actually working in all along — it drives Sandler’s entire comedic outlook, really — but generally it stays more subterranean, present but implicit. At the end, though, the goal is to punch you in the feelings. After telling the crowd that he’s playing 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. No one around, 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 just a long windup toward a thesis about laughter being the best medicine. It is also a film directed by Josh Safdie, and it has a classic Safdie-esque drive of suspense and barely contained chaos. Throughout Love You, Sandler’s a man beset by trials, the center of a slapdash production that’s barely holding together. At every moment, the whole thing feels like it could come apart, and the combination of stress, sincerity, and inanity is what makes Love You so delightful. It’s like a train full of clowns and fake plastic poop, perpetually flirting with derailment, that ultimately pulls into a destination 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, it’s an onslaught of noise, requests, and stimuli that drag Sandler in a dozen directions. Paparazzi are chasing him. The alley is full of people shouting for autographs, including a kid holding what looks like candid surveillance photos of Sandler’s real home. As he walks backstage, he realizes his lead-in act is a ventriloquist, and the crowd’s not into it. He switches sweatshirts with a random guy backstage because Sandler’s hoodie has coffee on it. Someone demands he sign 40 Happy Gilmore jerseys for a charity; he gets through about three of them before he’s swept onto the stage, barely avoiding getting tripped by a random dog as he walks downstairs and saying hello to a security worker’s hospitalized son via video call. It’s mayhem.
The opening chaos is tightly wound, carefully shot, and scripted to feel like anarchy, but as Sandler finally walks onstage, the mishaps continue, and it becomes difficult to tell how much of it Sandler knew about in advance. Three screens behind him are meant to display visual aides throughout the set, but they’re stuck on a Windows desktop background, and a voice-over on the theater-mic system informs Sandler that they’re doing their best to fix it. Sandler launches into his set, doing all he can to shake off the absurdity of that opening and the sense that this whole thing is a ramshackle mess. But on and off over the next hour, the interruptions continue. A piece of equipment falls through a hole in the stage. Two people in the audience get into a fight, and Sandler has to pause to diffuse it. At one point, the dog he almost tripped over backstage runs out into the audience, and Sandler stops while everyone greets the dog (whose name is Gary).
For comedians who reach a certain level of cultural ubiquity, fame becomes a problem to overcome in the work — an obstacle to relatability that has to be named and, ideally, punctured, or a summit to continually surmount with bigger venues and over-the-top spectacle. But this is Sandler’s (and Safdie’s) version of a special about fame, and it’s more effective and poignant than Kevin Hart doing self-deprecating jokes about his in-home wood-burning pizza oven or Ellen DeGeneres attempting relatable comedy about how much airplanes suck. Sure, you’re at the center of the stage, Love You suggests. Sure, everyone’s here to see you, and it’s an immense blessing, and ultimately you get to do this thing that you desperately love and believe in to the point that it’s almost painful. But you’re also the key figure of a huge economic and creative ecosystem, and when things go wrong, success or failure depends on you. Sandler’s just trying to keep it all moving. He’s trying to not be an asshole. And it’s worth it because people may laugh at an unnervingly detailed dream joke about an anthropomorphized birthday balloon that wants Sandler to satisfy it sexually.
Sandler’s two opening jokes both conjure the idea of fame as something to acknowledge and move past. One is about meeting a woman with a tattoo of Sandler on her calf. The other is about a friend coming up to Sandler while he’s eating grapes and telling Sandler he’s changed. “‘Get outta here, I’ve always liked grapes,’” Sandler tells the guy. But the other guy keeps insisting he doesn’t like this version of Sandler, and eventually he storms out. “So he left, and I said to the man who was feeding me the grapes, ‘What do you think? Do you think I’ve changed?’”
The rest of the hour tries to shake off that self-consciousness. There are no sweaty attempts to describe his life in falsely universal terms by focusing on parenting or marriage. When the observations are small or swerve into quotidian territory, Sandler usually turns them into songs, like one about how much time he spends doing household chores while muttering under his breath, or another full of Halloween sound effects that lists scary 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 leaning into an especially long anecdote, they lean surrealist, as in the horny birthday balloon or another long joke about finding a genie who insists his current master is a real jerk. (Even that one, though, finds a little button about fame at the end.)
It is standard Sandler material operating in comfortable territory. It’s occasionally a little underdeveloped, often quite juvenile, and sometimes rapturously specific about the oddities of modern life. The audience is present and palpable — in one joke, for instance, Sandler picks out a guy in the audience, highlights him with a spotlight, then sings a song about the guy who makes everyone uncomfortable by flying a drone around the beach. The audience seems game when, for no particular reason, Sandler brings out his friend Rob Schneider as an Elvis impersonator, singing “It’s Now or Never.”
But Sandler is still a man swimming upstream, battling to stay on track despite all the little things that keep going wrong, and it communicates a central idea that’s difficult to pull off in a way that feels authentic in a special, especially for someone with Sandler’s level of fame. This is not a glamorous job. This is not always fun. It’s often surreal in very small, unexpected ways, like when Gary strolls out onstage. And it’s also important, which Sandler conveys with absolute earnestness in his final song. As he lays out his thesis, this idea that comedy is the counterbalance to all of the hardest things in life, the screens behind him that’ve failed the entire time finally start working, playing a montage of scenes of 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 pass / All because Ace Ventura just talked with his ass / Yeah, the comedy,” he sings. Eventually the song becomes a list of gratitude, thanking dozens of Sandler’s heroes, colleagues and friends, and ending with shoutouts to friends who’ve died, including Chris Farley and Norm Macdonald.
Ultimately, Love You works as well as it does because it embraces the opportunity of taping a special to do something more than just record a Sandler show. His investment in sentiment pays off bigger and better, because the entire performance has also been a joke on him. He’s so committed to the bit that he’s willing to be the prank victim at his own show. Like any great special, Love You is a document of what’s happening inside Sandler’s head, but Safdie’s direction and the framing conceit turn it into a portrait of him, seen from the outside. He’s put upon and exhausted, and he loves this job with a clarity that’s almost blinding.
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