Billy Madison

In the 90’s Saturday Night Live experienced a renaissance. This was due to a supremely talented assortment of young comedians who revitalized the show. This included people like Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, David Spade, Chris Rock, and of course Adam Sandler. It is arguably the best cast ever assembled and they created some of the most lasting characters in popular culture history. Now these same people are superstars of the movie comedy world and had a certain couple of them not had their lives tragically cut short the world would be a much different (and much funnier) place today. Sandler is known these days for doing family films as well as some dramatic work, but he started his film career with one of the most absurdly bizarre and stupidly hilarious films of the 90s “Billy Madison.” It is a film that is heavily quoted by the people who loved it, and is still pretty funny to this day.

“Billy Madison” is a film about an idiot man-child who is set to inherit his family’s chain of hotels. When his father doesn’t believe he can handle taking over the company, Billy must prove himself by going back to school and repeating each of the twelve grades. This movie is full of buffoonery, extremely odd and absurd gags, and also some non sequiturs that may be the biggest laughs of the film. It’s full of many weirdly funny characters played by really talented performers that surround Sandler’s crazy antics. The idea of sending a grown man back to grade school is funny enough, but the films doesn’t become a one-joke movie. Each new grade has its own silly situations that occur as the character arcs and develops. Above all the movie is just really silly. It’s before Sandler had a chance to learn all the terrible Hollywood clichés, so it’s full of originality which makes the jokes all the funnier. I am convinced that a lot of the films comic success not only comes from Sandler, but the direction of Tamra Davis who knew exactly what gags needed more focus than others, and which ones just needed subtle implications to make them all the more hilarious.

I was a ten-year-old boy when this film came out, which seemed to be Sandler’s target audience at the time, aside from maybe college frat guys. His comedy CDs were full of weird and often gratuitously gross or dirty humor. This style is carried over into the film, but toned down and given a solid, if ridiculous, structure which makes everything better and even funnier. This film will always be a classic to me, and even if Sandler makes a hundred family films it will never erase the idiotic brilliance he displays in “Billy Madison.” He followed this movie up with the equally hilarious “Happy Gilmore,” but since then has steadily transformed his career into something else, and for better or worse something not as funny as we know he can be. But at least we can get a glimpse of his stupid genius through the miracle of DVD players and your very own copy of “Billy Madison.”