Adam Sandler still gets emotional when he talks about the phone call he made before performing a tribute song for his late friend Chris Farley on live television. Years after Farley’s death, Sandler picked up the phone and called Farley’s elderly mother in Wisconsin to ask for her permission before he sang a word. Her response changed the entire night, and what followed left grown men in the audience wiping their eyes on national TV. Sandler was born on September 9, 1966, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the youngest of four children in a working-class Jewish household.
He wasn’t a standout student, but he was the class clown who got sent to the hallway for making other kids laugh. At 17, encouraged by his older brother, he stepped onto the stage of a Boston comedy club and found that his gift for making people laugh was not a punishment but a calling. He studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he formed a tight circle of friends and future collaborators, including his college roommate Tim Herlihy, who would later co-write many of his biggest films, and director Frank Coraci, who would eventually put Sandler in front of the camera for the first time. In a comedy history class, he also met a quiet, awkward student named Allen Covert, who bonded with him over a shared love of Caddyshack.
Before the world believed in him, Sandler had quietly built a network of loyal and talented people who did. The early years were hard. Sandler bombed constantly at New York’s toughest comedy clubs, busked in the subway for spare change playing Beatles covers, and struggled with stage fright that made him gulp and choke on his lines in front of unresponsive crowds. But he kept showing up night after night at the Comic Strip, the same club where legends like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David had gotten their start.
There he first met a rising young comic named Chris Rock, who watched Sandler do a bit about basketball great Wilt Chamberlain and thought, “This guy is going to be something. ”
In 1987, Sandler landed a small recurring role on The Cosby Show, followed by a spot on MTV’s Remote Control. On the West Coast, comedians like Rob Schneider and David Spade were building reputations and catching sets from a scrappy young comic from New Hampshire who improved every time he got on stage. In December 1990, that momentum led to Saturday Night Live.
It was Schneider and Spade who put Sandler’s name in front of the right people. Weekend Update anchor Dennis Miller had scouted them at the Improv in Los Angeles and recommended them to SNL producer Lorne Michaels. Once inside, they pushed hard for Sandler to get a shot. He was added to the writing staff in December 1990 and moved back to New York into a tiny shared office with three other new faces: Chris Rock, David Spade, and a wild, oversized ball of energy from Wisconsin named Chris Farley.
Farley had been discovered performing at Chicago’s famed Second City. From the very first day, there was something different about him—a physical fearlessness, a willingness to throw his whole body into a joke, and a warmth underneath the chaos that made people love him instantly. Sandler and Farley became fast friends, the real kind who sit in a cramped office at 2 a. m.
rewriting a sketch for the 15th time, so exhausted neither can finish a sentence. Together they created some of the most memorable moments of that era of SNL, including the Lunch Lady Land sketch and the odd, sweet pairing of Herlihy Boy. Farley’s motivational speaker Matt Foley, screaming about living in a van down by the river before smashing through a coffee table, was pure unfiltered Farley. Underneath the chaos, though, there was struggle.
Farley battled addiction for most of his adult life and had been to rehab multiple times, even during his years on the show. Writers who worked closely with him, including Robert Smigel, who helped develop the Matt Foley character, later said they carried guilt over sketches that leaned on Farley’s size and physicality for laughs. Friends who knew him best warned him that his path looked exactly like the one that had killed John Belushi a decade earlier. Farley would laugh off those warnings, saying, “Those guys are my heroes.
That’s all fine and dandy. ”
In 1995, SNL went through a major overhaul. The show had been under fire for weak ratings, and NBC pushed Lorne Michaels to change the cast almost entirely. Phil Hartman and Mike Myers were out, and at the end of that season, both Farley and Sandler were let go.
Sandler later said the firing blindsided both of them, and they leaned on each other to get through it, pretending to be fine when neither of them was. “We got mad together,” Sandler told an interviewer years later. “Pretended we weren’t sad and pretended this was for the best. ”
For Sandler, it genuinely was for the best.
Two months before his firing even took effect, Billy Madison hit theaters. Critics tore it apart, but audiences made it a cult classic. “Getting fired from SNL was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Sandler would later joke, and the box office numbers backed him up. For Farley, the road looked promising at first.
He and David Spade struck box office gold with Tommy Boy in 1995 and Black Sheep in 1996. But privately, Farley was struggling more than the public knew. He reportedly wasn’t fully happy with the direction his career was taking, and at a screening for Black Sheep, he relapsed after three years of sobriety. He returned to rehab before filming his next project, a movie his closest friends and family openly tried to talk him out of.
In October 1997, against those quiet worries, Farley came back to host SNL. Nobody in that studio knew it would be his last time. The cold open addressed his sobriety directly, with cast members reassuring a skeptical Lorne Michaels that Farley was clean and ready, while his old friend and sponsor Chevy Chase appeared to vouch for him. But within minutes of the show starting, Farley didn’t show up for his own monologue at all.
His voice throughout the whole episode was noticeably strained, and he pushed himself physically hard in every sketch. Still, there were flashes of everything that made him unforgettable, including a tender dance scene with Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher and one last appearance as Matt Foley, screaming into a spin class before dousing himself in a pot of coffee for one final huge laugh. Buried in that episode was a small piece of TV history nobody noticed at the time: a sketch about a chaotic talk show baby played by Farley that was the very first sketch a young staff writer named Tina Fey ever got on air. In later reruns, NBC quietly cut the cold open and monologue out of respect for him.
Two months later, on December 18, 1997, Chris Farley was found dead in his Chicago apartment following a relapse. The cause was an accidental overdose of cocaine and morphine. He was 33 years old—the same age as John Belushi before him. For those who knew him best, the news was devastating but not entirely a shock.
Several of his closest collaborators, including Bob Odenkirk and Chris Rock, later admitted they had feared this outcome for years and carried real guilt over not being able to stop it. Sandler was gutted. He had lost the friend who shared that tiny office with him, the man who made him laugh harder than almost anyone in his life. For over 20 years, he carried that loss mostly in private.
He didn’t return to host SNL for two decades. Then, in 2018, on his Netflix special 100% Fresh, timed to the 21st anniversary of Farley’s death, Sandler did something he had never done before. He picked up a guitar in front of a live audience and sang a song written for his friend. It was raw, funny, and devastating all at once.
Lyrics recalled the first time he ever saw Farley, and warnings from friends who told Farley he’d end up like Belushi. Sandler also shared a private memory of finding Farley crying in an office one day over a KC and the Sunshine Band song because it reminded him of his own father—the kind of detail you only know if you truly loved someone. The following year, in May 2019, Sandler finally returned to host SNL for the first time since being fired nearly 25 years earlier. He closed the show with that same tribute song on the very stage where the two had built their friendship decades before.
Before singing a single note, he had quietly called Chris Farley’s mother to ask if it was all right with her. She gave her blessing, and Sandler later found out with visible warmth that she had become something of a local celebrity at her beauty salon the next day, with everyone wanting to talk about her son. The cameras that night were staffed by crew members who had worked alongside Sandler and Farley 25 years earlier. Seeing those familiar faces, now older, hit Sandler with a wave of feeling he wasn’t fully prepared for.
Cast members called it the most emotional moment they had ever witnessed on that stage. “Not a dry eye in the house,” one former SNL performer wrote afterward. Even years later, Sandler has said the song still catches him off guard. “The first few times we played that song, I would tear up and I couldn’t really sing it well,” he admitted on a podcast.
“Then I felt it and was able to get it out there. It’s weird, but when that song starts, I go, ‘All right, don’t cry and don’t do that still. ’ I’ve sung it maybe a hundred times already, but it rocks me. ” He says it’s because a video of Chris plays on screen behind him every time, and he sees his friend’s face again.
Sandler has stayed close over the years with Farley’s mother and his brothers, and says they still miss him a great deal. He says the biggest reaction of any show he performs, without fail, is when he mentions Chris Farley’s name. He shows his own kids old clips of Farley’s characters in Tommy Boy so his daughters know exactly who the funniest man he ever knew really was. David Spade, who was just as close to Farley, says he prefers not even to listen to the song.
He still posts quiet tributes on what would have been Farley’s birthday every year, admitting it still shocks him how life simply moves on for people who never got the chance to know his friend. Two young men thrown together in a cramped office early in their careers found in each other exactly what everyone hopes to find in a friendship: someone who believes in you before the world does, someone who makes the hard nights bearable, someone whose laugh you’d recognize anywhere. One of those men got to grow old, build a family, and become one of the most successful entertainers of his generation. The other didn’t get that chance.
And the man who did has spent every year since making sure his friend is never forgotten.
