When Adam Sandler first conceived “The Chanukah Song,” it was not immediately clear that it would be Sandler who brought it to life on Saturday Night Live. Instead, Sandler and the SNL writers who composed the song with him briefly entertained the idea of having Roseanne Barr do it. Barr is Jewish too, but equally important to this line of thinking was probably her notorious performance of the U.S. National Anthem at a 1990s San Diego Padres game. Barr was at the height of her fame at the time, but singing was…not her forte. On top of a vocal performance that wasn’t going to win any awards, Barr grabbed her crotch and spat at the end of the performance. In the context of a comedian at a baseball game, those are fairly innocuous jokes, but when attached to the National Anthem, it caused a brief but memorable moral panic.
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By the time 1994 (and “The Chanukah Song”) came around, that had mostly blown over, but the disastrous National Anthem performance remained a big part of Barr’s public identity. Whether it’s not wanting to dredge up the past, or seeing its potential for another young comic, Barr apparently passed on the opportunity.
“They were talking about Roseanne singing it, and she was nice enough to say ‘no, let Adam do that, that’s his, he wrote it, that’s his song,’” Sandler recently told Access Hollywood.
Since its first airing in 1994, the song has become a prominent part of Sandler’s stand-up set, and he continues to perform it now.
“I’m happy to be a part of Hanukkah. That was a good time of life to be associated with the song and the holiday. Very proud of that,” Sandler said in the interview. “I sing it alone, I sing it without the kids, I go into our basement, I rip it out, I do the soft-shoe to it. No, if it comes on the radio, and I hear it, I get excited, that’s still awesome.”
Sandler’s integration of music with his comedy would help when he made The Wedding Singer in 1998 — a movie that remains beloved and is widely regarded as part of Sandler’s early “golden age” of movies like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison. In 2002, Sandler would star in the animated Chanukah comedy Eight Crazy Nights, which featured the song. That was The second time (after Sandler’s 1999 album Stan and Judy’s Kid) that the song was rewritten to update its pop culture references. Sandler would do that one more time in 2015, and others who have covered the song have routinely swapped out old celebrities and events for ones that felt more current.
