7 Comedians Who Have Successfully Gone Dark

1) Adam Sandler – Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Previously known for Saturday Night Live raucousness, and movies such as Billy Madison and The Wedding Singer, Adam Sandler took everyone by surprise with the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. In a performance that Sandler has never quite been able to match, his lead character of Barry Egan is a small business owner with some deeply unsettled psychology at play. He suffers from extreme anger issues that lead to a stubborn reluctance to give ground when challenged – caused, in large part, by his hen-pecking sisters.

What is astonishing about Sandler’s performance here is its nuance and contained nature. Gone is the characteristically infantile, sometimes bumbling, always unassuming manifestation of male wish fulfilment, with which we have become so familiar. Instead, Barry is a troubled individual on the verge of blossoming into a self-realized man.

His transformation is sparked by an attempt to extort money from him after he contacts a phone-sex service run by the nefarious Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Trumbell’s threats to Barry, and his fledgling romance with his sister’s friend Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) are enough to trigger Barry’s anger – to the extent that he refuses to stop until he has neutralized those threats.