With The Naked Gun coming out Friday (and looking mighty good), Happy Gilmore 2 doing numbers on Netflix, and Friendship being the funniest shit I've seen all year, I figured I'd just make this Comedy Week. We've gotten quite a few good comedies this ½ decade and I hope Naked Gun is a hit that studios take the right lessons from (hope is delusional). Lots of them didn't make my list for one reason or another but they're absolutely worth mentioning based on sheer laughs alone. First, though, I wanna talk about those that are absolutely on my list:
Right from its stressful, bewildering opening, Adam Sandler: Love You had me in its grip.
Directed by the Josh half of the Safdies (a Halfdie) this is one of the most formally ambitious and unique comedy specials I've ever seen.
Experimental but also rigidly blueprinted, there's a great sense of wonder and confusion with every passing moment. Safdie and Sandler are prankish architects blurring the line between what's real-life shit falling apart and their gleeful machinations; everything seems to have an invisible string attached to it and, if you follow it, chances are you'll end up behind the cameras...or not. The venue is dank and intimate, as opposed to the arena showcases most established comedians stage their specials, which makes it easier for Sandler & Safdie to manufacture believable fuck-ups. As it kicks off it feels like Sandler himself has been yanked from reality and Last Action Hero'd into the Uncut Gemsverse: after pulling up with an inexplicably busted windshield and coffee on his hoodie, he's inundated from every angle by his agent, overzealous fans, a rabid dog(??), a security guard whose bloodied son is in the hospital, and a gigantic bodybuilder. That signature Safdie tension makes the comedy hit harder because it's reassuring on top of being amusing. The sound mixing just buries you alive and the editing so smoothly navigates you and the chaos out onto the stage with him: there's never an escape.
Sandler's songs and jokes are also just fucking great, so this isn't some gimmicky variety show to make up for his lack of material. He tells these elaborate, shaggy, surreal, and fantastical jokes that become more unpredictable and odd the longer he lets them go on (my favorite being a bit about a balloon following him home from a birthday party and he has to figure out how to make it cum). Even if some of the set-ups are a bit predictable, the punchlines hit because his delivery is so affable. And the ending is perfect in so many ways but mainly because he delivers a sincere ballad to Comedy itself and the comedians who've made a living making us laugh for nearly 100 years.
When it truly settles into its groove, this is Josh Safdie's Stop Making Sense. Adam Sandler adds yet another great movie to his increasingly eclectic filmography. I think I'll skip Happy Gilmore 2, though.
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