Live, Laugh, Love

Dick jokes meet sentimentality in a wily Sandler-Safdie collab.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

AT THE END OF Love You, Adam Sandler's new comedy special, he moves into a different register. After an hour of Sandlerian humor, with jokes about no-wipe poops and Botoxing your dick, 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. Throughout Love You, Sandler's a man beset by trials, the center of a slapdash production that's barely holding together, and the combination of stress, earnestness, and inanity is what makes the special so delightful.