American Idiot: Why ‘Billy Madison’ Is Still Adam Sandler’s Best Movie
It helps to remember what an oddball Sandler was when he first abbie-doobied his way into the public consciousness. His early stand-up act featured a tangent involving an Elvis Presley who was eight inches tall, living in Adam’s refrigerator and prone to stealing heads of lettuce. (Payback comes in the form of putting a miniature horse’s head in the King of Rock & Roll’s bed.) His guest appearances on MTV’s trivia gameshow Remote Control included alter egos like Bossy Boy, an early version of the high-voiced infantile idiot he’d trot out over the years, and Stud Boy, a vaguely European-sounding gigolo who dreams of celebrity hook-ups. (Think a younger, sleazier Zohan.) And once he joined SNL, many of Sandler’s recurring characters were remarkably strange even by Coneheads standards: the walking Bayou stereotype Cajun Man; the snake-calling, perennial assistant scoutmaster Canteen Boy; and the housesitting Herlihy Boy, who wants nothing more out of life than to take care of your grandmother and sleep in your bed.
Billy comes from the same stock as these other Sandler staples; he’s a stunted male who loves “pickle races,” pranks and eating paste as much as he digs porn. He might be an atypical lead character for a big-screen comedy circa 1995, but it was one that was totally in the comic’s comfort zone, from the vaguely preadolescent sense of fun to the sudden rage spirals. The director — Basquiat cohort, Beastie wife and boho royalty Tamra Davis — recently told the Washington Post that she didn’t “get” the film’s comedy at first, but quickly understood that silliness, rather than salaciousness, was the key. “I overloaded the sets and costumes with color,” she admits, “to show how a kid sees things.” Davis also switched out Wilson’s miniskirt ensembles for summer dresses so as not to “oversexualize” her, but thanks to the filmmaker’s shiny, happy set-up, our boy Madison never feels neutered — he simply comes off as a slightly pervier version of Pee-wee Herman.
None of this screamed slam dunk: In Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s SNL oral history Live From New York, Sandler remembers showing Lorne Michaels the script and having the producer tell him, “There’s some funny stuff, but that maybe this shouldn’t be [your] first vehicle.” (The comedian’s response suggested he was tempted to cut bait: “If I write a skit and it doesn’t get on the show, I don’t sit and cry about it, I just say I’ll write another one next week. So that’s how I felt about Billy Madison. I said, ‘OK, Herlihy, he doesn’t like this one. Let’s write another one.'”) You can picture Michaels flipping through the pages and thinking, So you play with shampoo bottles in the bath, and the maid keeps talking about your sweet ass, and then there’s a clown with blood trickling out of his mouth? And this is your bid for stardom?
