America Loves Idiot - Idiot Makes Money

While being an idiot gets you very little, acting like an idiot pays $20 million a film. Forget thought-out plots, well written scripts or performers with basic acting skills, America wants a dufus bumping into things while talking in a silly voice.

This has worked out well for Adam Sandler, a sort of comedian whose shtick consists entirely of using a voice that's half little kid, half overmedicated mental patient. Though his comedic range spans only three different types of inflection and exactly two expressions, Sandler has somehow become America's biggest star.

This barely talented goof rose to fame playing smiling idiots on "Saturday Night Live." Sandler's typical bit had him appearing on the show's news segment, "Weekend Update," singing in a voice that made him sound like a whiny eight-year-old.

Some of these songs had enough silly charm to be considered endearing in two-minute doses. Unfortunately, Sandler did nothing to expand his repertoire when he moved to the big screen, and charming became grating awfully quickly.

In making the leap to motion pictures, Sandler has followed the same course as countless other ex-SNLers. This strategy, which scientists call the "John Candy Paradigm," involves appearing in any movie offered, regardless of quality. From Steven Spielberg films to college productions or wedding videos, if the producers have money, Sandler shows up.

This practice has, as you might imagine, led to him appearing in a shockingly large number of bad movies. From his cameo in the wretched Dirty Work to his role in the Bobcat Goldthwait opus Shakes the Clown, this guy has been in movies that would shame Chevy Chase.

Sandler's poor taste does not stop at merely appearing in someone else's bad movie. His own resume as a headliner includes a film in which he attends grade school as a grownup and one in which he beats up Bob Barker. Though he has starred in seven movies, no one over the age of 13 could tell you the difference between any two of them. Of course, the premise hardly matters in a Sandler movie, but you can assume that David Mamet and Mike Nichols have written very few of them.

Most of his pictures have plots that the producers of "Sister, Sister" would reject, but the public never seems to care. Filled with jokes that no self-respecting fourth-grade class clown would use, every Sandler vehicle to date has earned more money than its predecessor.

Compared to the work of Adam Sandler, the collected output of Beavis and Butthead looks like Shakespeare. Sadly, Shakespeare rarely included scenes involving public urination, and he almost never wrote a whole play about a mentally unbalanced guy who smashes into stuff.

With his box-office success and enormous studio clout, Sandler will at some point turn his attention toward "quality" films. Since critics lauded Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, it seems likely that someone will cast Sandler in a film designed to bring home the Oscar.

Perhaps we can look forward to Sandler and Meryl Streep in a film about handicapped Irishmen trying to free Tibet while finding love on the deck of a sinking cruise ship. Or maybe we'll see him paired with Kristin Scott Thomas, Emma Thompson and a number of other interchangeable British women in a 12-hour epic about Jane Austen's secret romance with a whiny-voiced idiot who likes to bump into things.

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Last Updated: 06/01/00

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