3 & 30: Billy Madison
For the latest 30 for 30 pick, the Even Better boys go back to school
You’re reading the latest installment of 3 & 30. Just about every month, we’ll each be sharing one record, one film, and one other wild card cultural product beyond those categories we’ve been loving. (That’s the 3, and you can read our latest picks right here.) As for the 30, we both recently turned 30 and each made a list of our 30 favorite movies. We’ll be going through them all, one movie at a time.
Billy Madison (Tamra Davis, 1995)
Shawn: I watched nearly a half dozen Adam Sandler movies this past month, the high- and lowbrow and everything in between. So it was only fair to make room for one of the early bona fide classics, the good ol’ schoolboy Billy Madison himself. This just so happens to be one of your favorite movies of all time, as of age 30 — roughly the same time when Billy re-enrolls in elementary school — do I have that right?
Elliott: For the purpose of our 30 for 30 exercise…yes. Is it actually one of my 30 favorite movies? Debatable, but as I was assembling my list I began to notice a couple things…many of my faves were heavy and serious. I love me some heavy and serious, but it also felt important to shine witness to my juvenile side, the way where, much like Billy Madison, I remain an adult child that laughs at things I supposedly should’ve outgrown in grade school.
He may not possess the top tier filmmaking skills as Charlie Chaplin or Jerry Lewis, or the biting wit of Albert Brooks, or even have directing credits to his name, but I firmly believe the Sandman and his Happy Madison production outfit to be the premier American comedic auteur voice of his generation. You can argue whether or not that’s a good thing, but we’ve got no gripes with Sandman auteurism at Even Better. And I think Billy Madison is his early opus, verging into complete absurdity that, while I have much love for the rest of his filmography, I wish he made more like this.
Aside from universally beloved classics like Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems, when I think of the Shawn Cooke Sandman canon, I go to 50 First Dates, Meyerowitz Stories, and Spanglish. How was Billy Madison for you as somebody about Billy’s age as well?
Shawn: It’s a weird one, because while I’ve definitely seen Billy Madison before, scattered across countless chunks on TBS or the backseat DVD player of a friend’s minivan, this might have actually been the first time I can remember pressing play for myself and watching the whole thing from the top. I think this fell in the weird dead zone, where the years I was most interested in seeing it, I wasn’t allowed to watch it, and then quickly aged into the precocious Entertainment Weekly-subscriber kid who thought he was too good for Sandler. Luckily, I finally grew up for real and learned to love the man in all his modes (you’re right on with that Rushmore, though I could also toss in The Wedding Singer and Click).
Even without the strong nostalgia factor, this was still really satisfying, so damn funny, and absolutely in line with that Happy Madison auteurism you mention. (I’ve argued before — as a younger, dumber, skeptic of the Happy Madison lowbrow — that there's even some micro-auteurism happening within his frequent collaborators in Dugan, Coraci, and Brill.) And though this is one of the rare pure comedies he made with a one-off director in Tamra Davis, you still get a lot of those core joke setups, lovable weirdo supporting character archetypes, and ‘70s rock B-teamers filling in the margins (huge shoutout to my favorite of those bands, and possibly their best song in ELO’s “Telephone Line” getting a big needle drop). It’s not quite as mushy as some of the Coraci or Segal joints, but Sandler’s always been sweet and vulgar in the same breath — none more so than the sacrificial pants-peeing scene, with another classic Happy Madison trope of outsourcing the best lines to an older side character (“If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis”).
What are some of your favorite moments? What are the parts you know by heart at this point?
Elliott: I’ve known essentially the whole movie by heart for the majority of my life. But what separates it from other beloved comedies of my youth like Tommy Boy or even Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison still makes me laugh as hard as nearly anything else does today. I have so much love for the moments that remain constantly quoted (the aforementioned Miles Davis line, “T-t-t-today junior!”, “O’doyle rules!”, “I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.”) But it’s when it ventures into throwaway absurdity that the movie achieves the comedic sublime.
Like when Billy is chatting with his 3rd grade besties and the lunch lady appears out of nowhere, cackling like an evil witch about sloppy joes, for Billy to break the moment and say, “lady, you’re scaring us,” and everybody in the scene bursts into laughter. Or when Billy and his friends and (his dad for some reason) are watching television together, and a dog on the screen says, “Speak for yourself, moron!” and Billy reacts with, “ahahahaha, OH MY GOD THAT IS FUNNY!!” Or Billy’s nemesis Eric catching completely on fire, only to be completely fine in the next scene. These are moments I’ve seen countless times, but I’ll still catch myself with side splitting laughter just thinking of “lady, you’re scaring us”. Billy Madison continues to hit me in the sweet spot of my immature and absurd sense of humor. I’d wager that it’s largely responsible for shaping it too.
Shawn: You’re on the money with this movie being at its best when it drifts into the absurd — which reaches a fever pitch during that final act decathlon. I’d totally forgotten almost everything about this stretch, from the “my wife, the tramp” question categories to Bradley Whitford’s stumbles over business ethics devolving into guns drawn (and the bailout from Steve Buscemi’s vengeful nerd). Those side characters — Norm Macdonald, Chris Farley, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Theresa Merritt as Juanita, the Revolting Blob, alongside Buscemi and Whitford’s Looney Tune elasticity — are all pretty hall of fame. And speaking of the hall, I love the baseball cursive lesson stumping Billy with Phil Rizzuto (one of the fringiest HOF cases ever, whose meager career statline should all but guarantee Francisco Lindor’s place in there someday). But really, the ultimate hall-of-famer in this exercise is the big movie star himself.
Elliott: It all works because of Sandler. I often think of a clearly coked-out Paul Thomas Anderson fielding questions from pompous journalists at Cannes after Punch-Drunk Love’s premiere who would say, “why would you think to cast Adam Sandler as the lead of your movie.” PTA responds with, “He makes me laugh. I just love him. I absolutely love him. I think he’s the greatest.” Could not have said it better myself. Sandman forever.