Movie Review: Shh..Don't Tell

Shh...Don’t Tell

Adam Sandler

(Warner Brothers)

With his new album, Shh...Don’t Tell, Adam Sandler logs another entry in his collection of notoriously crude comedy albums, leaving caution and any semblance of political correctness to the wind. Despite the vulgarity and apparent immaturity of the tracks on this jam-packed album, which features thirteen joke sketches and seven innocuously amusing songs, you’ve got to give Sandler a morsel of credit for releasing a somewhat offensive string of impolite tracks in this day and age of FCC crackdown and Howard Stern censorship.

Amongst the 21 tracks by Sandler are a host of collaborations with celebrity comedians, including Saturday Night Live veterans David Spade, Molly Shannon and Rob Schneider. Topics covered in these jokes vary from what has become the ordinary for Sandler—innumerable jokes centered around potty humor—to the extraordinary, including the ins and outs of what you never knew it means to be a “Best Friend” on the track entitled as such. Intermingling with such innocuous lyrics like “Best friends tell you when you’ve got boogers on your nose/ Best friends don’t laugh when you wear your grandpa’s clothes” are vivid portrayals of ethnic, racial, and gender groups that would make even the unapologetic chauvinist Howard Stern cringe.

A distasteful four-minute skit painting an auditory picture of a homosexual machine known as “Gay Robot” has blown up in popularity already, and in response, Sandler is promoting the album with in-character interviews. But even stranger than the numbers involving a hunk of metal propositioning his friends and neighbors is the fact that Sandler’s fans have apparently discovered a new obsession—the dance club scene. DJs have remixed a number of the tracks off Shh...Don’t Tell—including “Secret,” a lyrically weak song sung to a thumping bass beat—with all of the workings of popular house music. Of the various remixes, the “Gay Robot” track remains the favorite for DJs to throw against manic dance beats. The consensus among clubgoers seems to be that not only is it funny to listen to an actor portray a suggestive robot, but it’s even more enjoyable to find yourself bopping around on a dance floor to a lame propagation of the stereotypes attached to gay males today.

The album is sure to be a hit with the apparent target audience of young teenage boys, especially with lyrics like those of “The Mule Session,” sung in a country-blues style over inarticulate strums of acoustic guitar: “My sister’s on the dope and my brother always picks his nose.” This album, as is the case with many of Sandler’s previous albums, is a resurrection of all of those jokes you remember hearing long ago in grammar school being spit out by purple-faced boys between stifled guffaws. I dare not think that the age group targeted by this album is greater than that of the average high school student.

Shh...Don’t Tell is sure to please the die-hard Sandler fan and a few surprising social groups, too. Even though the average person could perceive much of the content of this album to be offensive, it remains true to Sandler’s longtime mantra of making people laugh, period. The courage to be himself—even if that self is an immature, potty-humor-revering grown man—and to challenge the heavily imposed restrictions of the media today, is somewhat admirable.

—Mary Catherine Brouder