David Spade has made a career flipping off the notion that nobody likes a wise guy.
From his celebrity-scorching “Hollywood Minute” segments on “Saturday Night Live” to his slapstick flicks with Chris Farley, from his Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated role as a wise-cracking horndog on the NBC sitcom “Just Shoot Me” to a pre-MeToo lothario on CBS’s “Rules of Engagement,” from his Comedy Central talk show “Lights Out With David Spade” to his he’ll-say-anything standup act, Spade has been the personification of smarmy, snarky and snide.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in three more words: funny as hell.
Which is not to say that Spade, who performs at the Concours d’Elegance in Boca Raton on Feb. 25, is a one-trick pony. Among his roles have been a white-trash antihero in two “Joe Dirt” films, Griffin the Invisible Man in the animated “Hotel Transylvania” franchise, and a schlubby nice guy caught in a cringy blind date nightmare in Netflix’s “The Wrong Missy,” his latest live-action starring vehicle.
He also reveals a more personable side on the “Fly on the Wall” podcast he co-hosts with Dana Carvey, interviewing former and current fellow denizens of the SNL universe. In fact, during a recent podcast interview with Paul McCartney, the normally cooler-than-thou Spade even seemed a bit nonplussed. The question he came up with for Sir Paul was: “Would you have spelled the Beatles right if you had spell check back then?”
Let’s just say the clunker did not elicit a LOL. Was this the same comedian who once famously wisecracked about Eddie Murphy, “Look children, a falling star — make a wish!”
But then, that was way back in the SNL days. And today’s cancel-culture climate is not particularly a safe space for a comedian like Spade, who as you’d expect had some reservations about releasing his “Nothing Personal” comedy special on Netflix last year.
“After the Academy Awards, you go, ‘Oh my God, why am I doing a special when all eyes are on every comic at all times?’ It’s almost like I’m looking for trouble, but this is my profession,” he told Esquire when the special dropped.
“As for having it come out now, it’s called Nothing Personal. I’m older so I’m not as rough as I was on ‘Hollywood Minute’ in the old days. I make fun of myself more than others. I’m always part of the joke, and I think that helps balance out the times when you go after others.”
Not only is he, as he says, part of the joke, but his standup style takes for granted that everyone else is already in on the joke, creating a kind of comic camaraderie. Indeed, the flow of the show is so seamless, the tone so conversational, the material so personal (and ribald!) that it’s like Spade’s merely carrying on with some friends in his living room instead of before an audience at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis. It’s less of a performance than a hang.
It’s the sort of effortless shtick you’d expect from someone who’s been honing his comedic chops since his college days. Spade, 58, actually dropped out of Arizona State University to perform fulltime. In 1990, with the help of fellow funnyman Dennis Miller, he landed a writing gig at “Saturday Night Live,” but the transition to sketch comedy didn’t come easily. Much of what he wrote early was performed by Carvey (which makes for a funny full circle of sorts in their “Fly on the Wall” podcast).
In a recent episode with Lorne Michaels, Spade recounted the difficulty he had breaking in on the show.
“There were so many home-run hitters when I got in there … Lorne actually hung in there with me because it took a while to get my footing. I was trying to write — it’s hard to write for other people. I was just a standup. Thank God, I got in there ’cause it took me longer than most.”
At that point, Mr. SNL himself broke in with high praise for the comedian. “David, you were funny from the first day I met you,” Michaels said. “There was never a moment when I didn’t think it was gonna work.”
Eventually, the flaxen-haired Spade (apparently, his hair is a thing) seized his moment with the “Hollywood Minute” slot and developed into a comedic actor who made sarcasm a brand and turned roasting into an art form. Like the Dick Clark receptionist who greets celebs with “And you are . . . ?” or the “Total Bastard Airlines” attendant who dismisses each passenger with a snooty “Buh-bye.”
It was also at SNL that Spade was crammed into an office with the larger-than-life wildman Farley, a rampant practical joker who was known to run into the writer’s room naked as a gigantic jaybird.
“You had to walk through our office to get to [Adam] Sandler and [Chris] Rock. So we were all jammed in the corner,” he told Esquire. “Looking back, I had some of the smartest people around me. Farley, for looking dumb, could laugh at the smartest jokes. Nothing got past him. And he was a great laugher. It was so disarming. He always wanted to crack you up. It was great to have him around.”
Spade and Farley hit it off — and then hit it big, commercially if not critically, when they split SNL to make the physical-gag farces “Tommy Boy” in 1995 and “Black Sheep” a year later.
“He liked me being smart and him being dumb,” Spade said, explaining their “fat guy in a little coat” comedic formula — a Laurel and Hardy role reversal for the ’90s.
“He always wanted me to make fun of him, because he thought it was so hilarious. We played off that.”
The duo was planning a third buddy comedy when Farley died of a drug overdose in 1997 at the age of 33. Spade did not attend the funeral — “I just couldn’t have gone into a room where Chris was in a box.”
“I think about Farley every day,” Spade said. “I have his old coat from “Tommy Boy’.”
Those films with Farley were a couple of Spade’s biggest big-screen successes. Among the others are a few of his 12 collaborations with Adam Sandler. (Hard to believe — Sandler, the eternal juvenile, is a recent AARP The Magazine cover boy.) Most notable of them is “Grown Ups,” which, as Spade jokes, “has been keeping the lights on at TBS for the last five years.” Interestingly, however, their biggest moneymaker together was their third and final collaboration in the “Hotel Transylvania” series. It parlayed an $80 million budget into $528.6 million at the box office.
Spade has no problem owning up to his opportune orbit in the Adam Sandler bro-zone. As he quips in his special, he’s always primed to play the Sandler card.
“Oh, I shove Sandler down their gullet whenever I can. I use it all the time, actually. I use it at Taco Bell. ‘Oh, you don’t have the Chalupa today. Adam’s not gonna like this. [Double take.] You got it now?’ He’s like, ‘Who’s Adam?’
“So it doesn’t always work.
For tickets to David Spade’s gala-headlining show Feb. 25 at the Boca Raton Concours d’Elegance, visit BocaCDE.com.
