The Waterboy

Bobby Boucher grew out of Sandler's Saturday Night Live days. "You could compare him to 'Canteen Boy,'" Sandler said of the naive, canteen-wearing assistant scoutmaster he had played on the show, "whereas he does love water and they both get picked on a lot, but the thing I like the most about this character is just that he is a genuine, good person." Co-writer Tim Herlihy wanted to flip the formula of the earlier films: in Happy Gilmore, Sandler was the lunatic loose in a sane world, and the pressure was all on him, "whereas this was like a funhouse, crazy version of Southern college football milieu," the first Sandler movie where things were funny when he was off screen. Kathy Bates's agent did not want her anywhere near it, and she threw the script in the trash after a few pages; her niece fished it out, saw Sandler's name, and talked her into playing Mama.

The story: Bobby is a stuttering 31-year-old water boy who still lives with his smothering mother and believes his father died of dehydration in the Sahara. Fired by Coach Red Beaulieu after eighteen years, he turns up at Coach Klein's South Central Louisiana State Mud Dogs, losers of forty straight, flattens a player who trash-talks his mother, and becomes the team's weapon. New uniforms and a Bourbon Bowl date with Beaulieu follow, until Beaulieu exposes his fake high school transcript and Bobby has to pass a GED to play. Henry Winkler was Klein, Fairuza Balk the girlfriend Vicki, and Lynn Swann, Lawrence Taylor, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Cowher and Rob Schneider turned up in cameos. Louisiana was mostly Central Florida: the Mud Dogs' home games were shot at Spec Martin Stadium in DeLand, with other scenes at Orlando's Citrus Bowl.

Touchstone released it on November 6, 1998. The reviews were brutal. Roger Ebert said Sandler had built a character with the effect of "fingernails on a blackboard" and put the film on his most-hated list; Rotten Tomatoes still sits at 33 percent. Audiences gave it an A-minus CinemaScore and $39.4 million in its first weekend, then a record for a November opening, beating Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. The Phantom Menace trailer attached to prints in week two did not hurt. It finished with $190 million worldwide on a modest budget, and as of 2020 it remained the highest-grossing sports comedy of all time.

Sandler got a Razzie nomination for Worst Actor and an MTV Movie Award in the same season. The legacy is mostly a dialect: LSU fans kept comparing coach Ed Orgeron to Farmer Fran, and Sandler said in 2022 he would happily make a sequel if anyone could work out the story.