Shuffling back and forth across an Atlantic City stage, Adam Sandler sang a nonsense phrase as he shone a flashlight around the room, taking in the sea of faces staring back at him. “Lie dee-die dee-die dee-die dee,” he chanted.

“Lie dee-die dee-die dee-dum,” the 7,000 people packed into the Hard Rock Hotel’s indoor arena sang back at him.

There’s a word in ancient Greek that describes what Sandler had become by the end of his 90-minute show on Friday night: the ψῡχοπομπός (psychopompos), or “psychopomp.” Though it is usually applies to those tasked with guiding souls from one world to another—Hermes conducting the dead, for example—it can also be used in the case of an artist who reaches the zenith of a performance and, in one fierce jerk, leads the souls of their audience along with them in a collective emotional experience.

Yes, by the end of the night on the hallowed shores of the Garden State, where the street signs served as inspiration to the makers of America’s number one board game, the man who once showed us all what it would look like to rip a five-second fart directly into David Hasselhoff’s open mouth had achieved the status of psychopomp.

But first, there were dick jokes to tell.

Courtesy of A24

Wearing a gray zip-up hoodie and stopping to periodically sip from a takeaway coffee cup, Sandler told stories about clown coffins, orally pleasuring a balloon, and getting his penis Botoxed. The crowd fizzed with delight. Many had come dressed as Sandler’s characters; it was three days before Halloween, after all. As a row of costumed frat buddies took their seats, a redheaded woman several rows over shrieked out their identities one by one, as if recognizing old friends: “Happy! Zohan! Nicky! Billy!”

“O’DOYLE RULES!” the Billy screamed back.

Many, many others came decked out in Phillies gear. “Is there a game on tonight?” my friend asked. (There was.) For my part, I had stoutly packed my baggiest pair of basketball shorts—an indelible part of any self-respecting Sandler fan’s wardrobe—but had been thwarted by the gritty autumn winds whipping off the ocean that day. The three of us had arrived in Atlantic City after two and a half hours on a Greyhound. We dumped our stuff at a fleabitten motel a block behind the Boardwalk and set about wasting the hours before the show.

We weren’t strangers to Atlantic City, having trekked out from New York City months before in search of a Rainforest Cafe better than the one in Edison, New Jersey. But in October, the scene was bleak. A scattering of pedestrians drifted down the windswept Boardwalk, largely ignoring the few people out panhandling and the handful of storefronts that hadn’t shuttered for the season.

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After being chased out of the abandoned theme park on Steel Pier and the silent mall of Playground Pier by disgruntled security personnel, we wandered into Caesars. The biggest casinos—Hard Rock, Caesars, Tropicana, Borgata, Harrah’s—were still reliably jammed on a Friday night. At the bar, a cheery guard came up to us to politely inform my friend they reminded him of a dead America’s Got Talent contestant. That was enough liminal spookiness for one evening, we decided. Time to decamp to see the Sandman.

“God, why?” one friend had asked in the days leading up to the trip. The look of abject horror splashed across his face notwithstanding, it was a decent question. Why the desire—nay, the need—to embark on this hapless quest? I suppose it was because I myself was burdened with a burning question: Wherefore art thou, Sandler?

I needed to know why, often against all sense and good taste, Sandler endures. If there was an innate magic to him, a spark that Paul Thomas Anderson was arguably the first to recognize two decades ago, I needed to see it for myself. If there was, why is it that so many remain ignorant of his power? And why, for the love of God, is he once again trying to get some of those blind fools to hand him an Oscar?

I had a working theory that seeing him perform live, in a throwback to his semi-forgotten stand-up roots, would somehow solve all these mysteries. To paraphrase his mulleted wedding singer: He would have a microphone, and I wouldn’t, and I would listen to every damn word he had to say. At the very least, I hoped, it would provide some clarity on the puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a conundrum that is Adam Richard Sandler.

Adam Sandler is a dude on a spiritual quest. As a purveyor of all things puerile, he’s trying desperately to tell us who he is. He’s made it clear in the past that each of his movies, whether it be Billy Madison or Jack and Jill, Uncut Gems or Hubie Halloween, are part of his identity. “I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there,” he once explained, “and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‘All right, that about sums it up.’” So when someone calls That’s My Boy “mean-spirited and charmless,” or says Grown-Ups 2 “reeked of desperation,” it must feel like a personal attack.

None of that matters when he’s up on a stage, however. When he whips out his unique titration of shaggy, scuzzy, and unabashedly dumb musical comedy, the pilgrims who have come from miles around to get sprayed in the face with essence du Sandman beg for more. It’s when he’s able to serve up a steaming plate of his brand directly to his fans that Sandler can really start cooking with gas. He is free to be strange. To be stupid. To be sublime.

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Within the safe space of a room in Atlantic City, he was frequently all three at once. A Sandler song is stripped-back and simple, if you’re being kind. (Flimsy and underdone, if not.) They’re the kind of thing that makes a skeptic roll their eyes and accuse the man of capitalizing on a formula. This is the type of person who calls Sandler a dead-eyed cynic jetting off to spend millions of Netflix’s dollars on an exotic vacation with family and friends while filming what can legally be classified as a “movie.” There’s nothing I can say to persuade that person, who probably still also refers to his legitimately great films like Punch-Drunk Love or The Meyerowitz Stories as “anomalies.”

To others, it allows the “56-year-old asshole,” as he referred to himself, to still feel like the 17-year-old college kid whose brother dared him to try an open-mic night in Boston; or the fresh-faced Saturday Night Live recruit breaking in the middle of a raunchy sketch; or the nervy new movie star, telling Entertainment Weekly in 1995 that he felt “so much pressure” because he wanted Billy Madison “to be as good as it can be.”

Because Sandler does indeed give a fuck—he always has. His face twisted up in concentration as his fingers flew over the frets of his gray Stratocaster guitar, a present from his father after the 12-year-old Sandler learned every note of the exceptionally challenging Cuban piece he was now performing for us. “Woah,” my friend murmured next to me. “I had no idea.”

Sandler told The Daily Beast in 2014 that he doesn’t really read reviews, but that he “[hears] about ‘em,” and has friends who will call him up to tell him “how much they hated my last thing.” And though he’s insisted he doesn’t get “too shook up” by criticism, he can be petty, even spiteful. As if in revenge for the bad reviews, he spent roughly two decades refusing to sit for a major magazine profile. He named his 2018 Netflix special 100% Fresh. And when he returned to host SNL in 2019, he sang: “I was fired, I was fired / NBC said that I was done / Then I made over $4 billion at the box office / So I guess you could say I won.”

There’s evidently a part of him, as there is in every performer, that longs for validation. He told Vanity Fair recently that losing an audience mid-set is “painful,” echoing comments he’s been making in that vein since 1994. He’s also extremely anxious about aging and his legacy, as he made clear in Atlantic City. “Adam Sandler, getting older, can’t believe it,” he mused to us in disbelief at the top of the show. “Getting fatter.”

In one of his most revealing jokes, Sandler described an exchange with his daughter’s 16-year-old friend. “What’s your name?” Sandler asks the surly teenager, who is standing in his kitchen. “Ryan,” he replies. “What’s yours?” To Sandler’s growing irritation, Ryan continues to feign ignorance of who he is, with the situation escalating until Sandler is holding a literal gun to the kid’s head. “Hey, buddy—what’s my name?” he hisses. At long last, Ryan whimpers, “Adam Sandler.” Back in reality, the Hard Rock audience went bananas at this.

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That anyone might forget Sandler or his work eats at him, as does the establishment’s rejection of both—much as he might try to pretend otherwise. After he was viciously snubbed of an Oscar nomination for Uncut Gems in 2019—and not for lack of trying—he was evidently stung. The night before the ceremony, as he accepted an Independent Spirit award for his performance, Sandler beamed his shit-eating grin out at the audience as he called the chosen Oscar nominees a bunch of “feather-haired douchebag motherfuckers.”

In December 2019, the month before nominations were announced, Sandler had also infamously joked that he would “fucking come back and [make a movie] that is so bad on purpose just to make you all pay” if he was passed over. But he hasn’t yet followed through on this threat. (Though it was released months after the Oscars, Hubie Halloween had wrapped production by the previous September.) The only movie he’s starred in since has been Hustle; his next is Spaceman, a sci-fi drama.

In recent weeks, Sandler has quietly kicked off a full-court press in campaigning for his work in Hustle, the good-hearted Netflix sports drama from this summer in which he plays a beleaguered NBA scout. Vanity Fair noted last week that he’d already appeared on the magazine’s awards-watch podcast, done a cover story for AARP, and was once again smiling and waving at industry events “everywhere from West Hollywood to Santa Barbara.”

Another journalist observed that Sandler seems to be in full-on “Awards Season mode” weeks ahead of his potential competition. It’s already won him a tribute prize at the Gotham Awards, often a bellwether for future Oscars fodder, with at least three past recipients—Kristen Stewart, Viola Davis, and Laura Dern—going on to be nominated in the last three years alone.

Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Sandler is not naturally comfortable playing the political candidate. (Whether out of nerves or insecurity, he defaulted to leading the reporter finally granted that lengthy interview with him in 2019 on a tour of his country club, showing them the fitness center “like a leasing agent.”) If he’s going to go the distance on what is shaping up to be a very long, concerted effort to sway a group of people hellbent on disliking him, he’s going to have to lean on those he loves.

Watching Adam Sandler’s stand-up, I didn’t start to cry until “Farley.” The song is a eulogy for his friend Chris Farley, who died of an overdose in 1997 at 33 years old, and at this point is a well-known Sandler number. I knew the lyrics by heart. I thought I was prepared. And then he added a new name: “You’re a legend like you wanted, but I wish you were still here with me / And you and me and Norm were getting on a plane to go shoot”—his voice shot up into a wailing falsetto—“‘Grown Ups 3.’”

Courtesy of Netflix

As the audience cheered and Sandler turned to watch a clip of a younger version of himself goofing around with Farley and Norm Macdonald play out high above his head, I dropped my gaze. That song’s roll of names is only going to get longer, I thought. Sandler will play it until he can’t anymore. But who will play it after he’s gone? Who’s going to make sure his name is added to the list?

The final song of the evening was, as in 100% Fresh, the sweet ode “Grow Old With You.” Largely a tribute to his wife, who lets him “talk about fingering her in front of you all,” the song eventually, briefly, turns into a reflection on his relationship with his audience. “Thanks for growing old with me,” he sang to the darkened room, as a video montage of his former selves played out over his head.

“We’re getting older. I can’t stand it,” Sandler told the audience, seconds before launching into the song. Those words rang in my ears as we left, melting into the crush of Sandler fans that spilled out onto the main floor of the casino. Outside in the cold air, though, there seemed to be more crows than people. Shivering, we retreated to a nearby pub, where we half-watched the Phillies go on to win their game. By the end of the night, we were all hours older—but, thankfully, no wiser.