Adam Sandler: Were You There?

So what the hell was Adam Sandler doing at Great Woods last Saturday night? Well, the short answer is that his largely scatological material is too off-color for the Harborlights Pavilion. (Apparently, singing songs that make reference to shampoo bottles being inserted in one's rectum is acceptable in rural Mansfield but not downtown Boston.) The longer answer has something to do with a band featuring heavy-hitting session dudes like Waddy Wachtel, Bob Glaub, and Don Heffington, a new Sandler disc titled What the Hell Happened to Me? (Warner Bros.), and the rather sad state of stand-up comedy.

See, Sandler already has one platinum disc under his belt -- 1993's Grammy-nominated they're all gonna laugh at you! (Warner Bros.). And as if that and the success of his moronic movies Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison weren't enough to make anyone old enough pine for the heyday of Jerry Lewis (and those of us young enough to be thankful that at least Andrew Dice Clay's career finally hit the wall), he's on his way to scoring another. But the scariest thing about Sandler isn't his popularity -- hell, Pauly Shore's celebrity poses a much greater threat to any kind of rational world view. It's the way he pulled off a pretty damn faithful rendition of a Bob Marley tune. Fortunately, the version of Springsteen's "When I'm Out on the Street" that he ended the show with sounded like shit. (It was, however, better than Wachtel's one humiliating attempt at comedy, where he said that he likes putting Fenway Franks in his ass. No kidding.)

Why anyone would want to pay money or travel any distance to see or hear Sandler play good or bad Springsteen or Marley covers would raise more troubling questions if that were why several thousand people showed up at Great Woods on Saturday. But they weren't there for Sandler's singing. They were there for his comedy, which raises other troubling questions. To say that Sandler's particular brand of humor -- typified by obtuse Saturday Night Live! characters like "Cajun Man," "Opera Man," and "Canteen Boy" -- straddles that fine Spinal Tap line between clever and stupid would be to miss the point. Sandler's shtick relies on confusing the two with such gusto that one is faced with two choices: either acknowledge that there is no real difference between clever and stupid and laugh along with the crowd, or load, aim, and fire a large semi-automatic weapon in the general direction of the stage . . . or something like that.

I stuck with the former option, having been trained by Hollywood that suspending one's aesthetic values along with one's disbelief can lead to a greater enjoyment of the product. And, yes, I laughed: at the moronic line "You won't get no candy/You won't get squat/But there's a possibility that he'll boil you in a pot" from Sandler's new and as-yet-unrecorded spooky Halloween novelty song; at his Joe Cocker-style delivery of the "Lunch Lady Song"; and at his having the clout to hire a full backing band, replete with two guitarists, three sexy back-up singers, a percussionist, and a guy who's played behind Bob Dylan (Heffington). Oh, and his intentionally bad guitar solo on "Communication Breakdown" was kind of funny, too, in an annoying sort of way.

But, like his albums, the Great Woods show relied very little on stand-up comedy skill. It was, at its cleverest and most stupid, a parody of a rock concert, or of a comedian doing a rock concert. So I guess the real question isn't what was Adam Sandler doing at Great Woods last Saturday night, but what were several thousand spectators doing there? And that I can't answer.

-- Matt Ashare