Happy Gilmore was born on the range. When Adam Sandler was a kid growing up in New Hampshire, his father was an avid golfer. He’d often take his son along to hit balls at the driving range. But Sandler was uninterested in the sport, and usually got antsy. “Why don’t you bring a friend?” his dad told him. So Sandler took his buddy, Kyle McDonough, a star hockey player who’d later turn professional.
“He never played before but he was cracking the ball so far,” Sandler recalls. “So when I started becoming a comedian and me and (Tim) Herlihy were writing stuff and stand-up and talking about movies, I started thinking about a guy who could hit it really big and had a hockey player mentality.”
Happy Gilmore, released in 1996, was Adam Sander and Tim Herlihy’s second movie, following Billy Madison. Sandler was just exiting Saturday Night Live. Herlihy was Sandler’s roommate at New York University and became a lawyer before Sandler got him to stick to writing comedy. (You might remember the Herlihy Boy sketch.)
“We had just done our first movie, Billy Madison, and we put every idea we ever had for a movie in that movie,” says Herlihy. “So when they said we could do another movie, it was like, ‘What are we going to do this movie about?’”
Sandler was well aware of the checkered history of comedy sequels. Movies like Zoolander 2 and Anchorman 2 have struggled to recapture the freewheeling spirit of the originals. The movie Sandler counts as his favorite, Caddyshack — so much so that he was initially hesitant to make a golf comedy — spawned 1988’s woebegone Caddyshack II.
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“If someone brought it up to us, we were like, ‘Yeah, no, we’re not going to do that,’” Sandler said in a recent interview alongside Herlihy. “There was no moment we went ‘Aha.’ It just kind of happened. The last couple years, we were talking about Happy and how it might be funny if he was down and out.”
In Happy Gilmore 2, co-written by Sandler and Herlihy, Happy is a decorated retired golfer with four sons and a daughter (played by Sandler’s daughter, Sunny Sandler). But after a tragic incident and falling on hard times, he’s lured back into golf. This time, though, Happy is an insider, motivated to protect the sport. Safdie co-stars as the founder of Maxi Golf, a new circus-like tour with long hitters.
“We thought it could be fun to write something like that” says Sandler. “It kind of connected to our lives and this age, and wanting to make a full-on comedy. There’s nothing better than dropping a comedy and trying to make people laugh, to us. It feels like why we originally got into this business.”
Big, broad comedies have grown almost extinct in the decades since Happy Gilmore. Returning to that style of comedy was, for Sandler and Herlihy, the best reason to make the sequel. For the 58-year-old friends and regular collaborators, it was a chance to riff like they used to.
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“We were outlining the story together and then we were like, ‘We should watch the first one again, man,’” Sandler says. “We’re going off of our memory of so many things, hanging out with Carl Weathers and Bob Barker and all that stuff. Then we watched it and we were like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ It was a tone.” “It made a little more sense than ‘Billy Madison,’” says Herlihy, “but we weren’t afraid to swing, swing, swing.”
