Adam Sandler Scrapped Original Song for ‘SNL50’
It’s pretty much a consensus that on a chaotic night of hastily thrown together comedy, the emotional highlight of Saturday Night Live’s 50th birthday party was Adam Sandler’s heartfelt tribute to the comics who’ve graced the Studio 8H stage over the past five decades.
But we almost didn’t get to hear that song, “50 Years,” at all. Veteran SNL writer and frequent Sandler collaborator Dan Bulla revealed that the pair had come up with a different bit entirely. “And then, it must have been a week before the show, Sandler called me up one morning and was like, ‘I don’t think that’s it,’” Bulla told Vulture.
Sandler confessed to Vulture that the two were wandering in the comedy wilderness, trying to come up with the right sketch or song. “And then,” he said, “something clicked two days before the show.”
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No pressure or anything, but everyone in the history of Saturday Night Live would be watching. “We would remind each other of who was going to be there, and we were like, ‘Oh, man, we better kick some ass for everybody,’” Sandler remembered. “That audience is pretty amazing, so we were like, ‘Let’s rethink it for a second.’”
Sandler was walking his dog when he FaceTimed Bulla with just a few days to spare, sharing the “50 years” chorus that would become the song’s hook. Bulla dug it, hopped on the subway and joined up with Sandler, where the two brainstormed lyrics and zeroed in on the groove. As it often happens with the right idea, the song came together in less than a day.
“It was the best, man. It was fun. You were flowing,” Sandler said. “We were both coming up with good shit.”
The funny thing about Sandler: You’d never have guessed from his SNL tenure that he’d become the show’s go-to emotional secret weapon. Janeane Garofalo hated her tenure with Sandler and Chris Farley, complaining in oral history Live From New York that theirs was the era of using the words “bitch” and “whore” in every sketch. From Canteen Boy to the Gap Girls to Cajun Man, Sandler was hilarious but far from someone who might make you choke back the tears.
That changed sometime in the past 10 years, probably around the time Sandler did his musical tribute to Farley when he returned to host SNL in 2019.
He followed that up with the surprisingly sweet “Here Comes the Comedy” from his most recent Netflix stand-up special.
“Sandler does everything with heart,” explained Bulla. “But we don’t sit down and say, ‘All right, we got to get this one emotional.’ It’s just kind of who he is.”
A 50th anniversary song made the emotional part easy “because it’s nothing but memories,” Sandler said. “The coolest thing about that audience was everybody had the same feeling as you; that show meant something to their life no matter what.”
