Adam Sandler’s ‘Love You’ and Other Netflix Specials to Stream Now

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Adam Sandler’s ‘Love You’ and Other

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Specials to Stream Now

When Barack Obama made a reference to the size of Donald J. Trump’s, ahem, crowd size, in his speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, he brought a category of lewd joke into the absolute center of the mainstream. This unlikely achievement owes a debt to Adam Sandler, who has been consistently committed to the art, at least since writing a ****** rhyme in a classmate’s

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Now 57, Sandler is still at it, and judging by his new special, “Love You,” he hasn’t lost a step. Before he became a huge star, Sandler made proudly filthy and beloved comedy albums full of irreverent sketches that chronicled subjects like an extremely long bout of urination. This new special can feel like a throwback to that era. If anything, age allows new avenues for potty humor. Have you considered the bountiful comic implications of how botoxing away the wrinkles on a ****** could lead to mistaking a flaccid member for an ****** one? Adam Sandler has.

“Love You” begins with Sandler heading to a stand-up show and everything going wrong. His car’s windshield gets busted, and then he requires a last-second costume change. There are tech issues. From his car to the dingy hallway backstage, we see him, via frenetic, crooked camerawork, being bombarded by people making demands — some annoying, others disturbing, all gradually ramping up a vague sense of anxiety.

If it feels as if it’s a sequel to “Uncut Gems,” that may be because the special is directed by Josh Safdie, who along with his brother, Benny, made that jittery, giddily caffeinated drama, a high-water mark of late-career Sandler. Whereas Benny Safdie followed that up by collaborating with Nathan Fielder on the TV show “The Curse” to push his genre-blurring style in more narratively complex directions, Josh wasted no time putting his mark on the aesthetic of another comedy star.

Sandler’s last special, “100% Fresh” (2018), was a key stage in his transformation from critically dismissed superstar of man-child comedies to widely beloved éminence grise. He hasn’t exactly matured — that would ******** his comedy — so much as allowed sentimentality to overtake the humor. He had help from family. His wife (who shows up at the end of the new special) and daughters are now as much regulars of his work as Chris Rock, David Spade and his old friends from “Saturday Night Live” are.

“Love You” maintains some of the same schmaltz, especially in its final song, a mournful ode to comedy that has the vague nostalgic glow of an Oscar montage. But this special is a grungier, less ingratiating affair than the previous one. Not everything hits hard, in part because this is a quirkier effort that will delight the hard-core Sandler fans, those who stuck with him before the critics came around. Safdie strips down the production of his arena shows — the video use is sparing but effective — and leans into the weird, indulgent Sandler.

Sandler gives his pal Rob Schneider an unnecessary cameo doing an Elvis impression, the sweaty Vegas version, a scene that seems designed to alienate as much as impress. The best parts of the special are its long, winding ****** stories, told in his characteristic mumble. There’s one beautifully disgusting joke about a genie outside an airport bathroom that belongs to “The Aristocrats” genre of ******-out humor.

Sandler’s yarns ramble and spin in wild directions, often seeming to meander only to abruptly pull up to the point and end up in service of deceptively clever ideas. He has a few quick jokes, including one about parents who hit their kids with a belt. “I don’t hit my kids with it,” he says. “It’s because I wear sweatpants.” But for the most part, his special is filled with stories and songs, with a dizzying array of styles, including one wonderful tune out of a spaghetti western that complements lyrics about him muttering under his breath in annoyance. It’s the closest we get (along with an outburst at his tech guy) to that trademark ****** outburst, which stays mostly in check.

In crooked angles and close-ups, Safdie shoots Sandler watching his show fall apart. A dog runs onstage. The video doesn’t work. Sandler makes one joke about his own fame and stature, but the visuals undercut any hero worship, even putting silhouettes of the heads of audience members in the foreground. He’s playing a small room and speaking softly about juvenile things. For a certain kind of comedy, that’s all you need.

Langston Kerman, ‘Bad Poetry’

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In his terrific debut hour (he released a shorter special on Comedy Central), Langston Kerman displays the kind of effortless, *****-back charm that can make you underestimate him. There’s an ease with which he moves between talking about his mother’s romantic life or the student cruelty he experienced when he was a schoolteacher that can make his act seem tossed off. You might also just think he benefits from great stories, like an amazing one about a man his mother married who was fired from his job as an N.B.A. mascot. But there’s a precision to his low-key stories and an attention to detail that puts jokes across. His setups and punchlines are solid, but even his transitions contain gems like: “All our heroes are monsters and all of our monsters have podcasts.”

He works hard to skirt cliché, no mean feat when dealing in mother-in-law jokes. He does a lot of material about the love lives of mothers, and somehow makes it seem wholesome, relying on a sensible good-boy persona. It might remind some of John Mulaney, who directed this special. The hour’s small-scale Chicago setting makes it feel like a chat in a living room. Both comics have a confident delivery, a sneaky arty streak and an affection for old-fashioned locution. When Kerman takes over the dating app from his mother-in-law and plays recordings of men who leave messages for him, he stops himself. “No, nay,” he says, then offers a correction: These weird flirtations are too oddly poetic to be merely called phone messages. They’re “pieces.”

In a bit about how school shooters are almost always men, Hannah Berner says, “When a man snaps, he shoots stuff. When a woman snaps, she gets bangs.” Then she pauses. “And that’s an ******** on herself.” Berner has turned her fun debut special into a fixture on the

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Top 10 for a reason, and it’s not the originality of the material. She does jokes about Disney princes as kinds of boyfriends and evergreen constructions like: “I turned 30 … 29 months ago.” And yet, Berner delivers what she calls “

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” with swagger and anything-goes charisma. After walking onstage, she drops to the floor and does the worm, then mocks herself for it. In between jokes, she offers an impression of the audience that is both blasé and a bit glamorous. Her crowd work doesn’t feel as if it’s following the trend so much as demonstrating a natural extension of her delight in entertaining audiences. Even though her material is raunchy single-girl stuff, she’s married. She flashes a look and quips, “Off brand.”

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#Adam #Sandlers #Love #

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#Specials #Stream

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