Holy schnikes, 'Tommy Boy' just turned 30! (2025)

Thirty years ago this spring, the incarnation of Saturday Night Live that had returned the show to its former glory was on its last legs. Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Nora Dunn had all departed the show, and while newer faces like Adam Sandler and Chris Farley had plenty of audience recognition and affection, especially from the younger crowd, reviews were the show’s 20th season had been terrible. (There wasn’t even a splashy anniversary special in the offing.) Normally, this might have been a bad omen for any burgeoning movie careers; after all, Carvey, Hartman, Hooks, Dunn, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller had all failed to launch as major movie stars, and they were members of the most acclaimed cast since the first five years.

The exception, to some degree, was Mike Myers, whose Wayne’s World had been a big success a few years earlier, nudging SNL producer Lorne Michaels back into the movie world. Wayne’s World almost certainly led to the existence of a miniature bumper crop of SNL star vehicles in the spring of 1995: Sandler starred in Billy Madison in February, and then Farley and David Spade had Tommy Boy at the tail end of March. And if Billy Madison piggybacked on the slightly surreal Wayne’s World style, it was Tommy Boy that shared more of its creative team: Not only had Farley appeared in both Wayne’s World films (as different characters!), but Michaels produced Tommy Boy himself, with a screenplay credited to Wayne’s World co-writers Bonnie and Terry Turner.

Credited, that is, on the screen; off-screen, the poor Turners are repeatedly dismissed from all directions when it comes to behind-the-scenes materials related to the making of Tommy Boy. According to Lorne, the recent released biography of Michaels, the idea for the movie, once called Billy the Third, originated with him: “Michaels had pitched [Paramount head] Sherry Lansing an idea about the charismatic head of an automative business, who dies and leave his inept son in charge.” (In the final film, it’s more about Farley’s character going on a last-ditch sales trip to drum up enough business to save the factory, etc.) Director Peter Segal never talks about the Turners when he reminisces about making the movie, focusing instead on how an uncredited Fred Wolf (like the Turners, an SNL alumnus) worked with Farley and Spade to rewrite and punch up the movie on the fly; interviewees for the biography The Chris Farley Show say the finished Tommy Boy was essentially written by Wolf.

At the same time: A follow-up Farley/Spade vehicle actually credits Wolf on the screenplay, with the same stars presumably riffing and punching up as they went, and has Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris on hand. Yet Black Sheep is still pretty terrible, serving only to burnish Tommy Boy’s reputation further. And that reputation isn’t undeserved. While the movie is unabashedly corny, and sometimes clumsy in its close tailoring to the stars it needs to serve, the underdog-road-trip-mismatched-buddy formulas stacked on formulas provide the perfect guardrails for a lot of Farley/Spade schtick. Farley is the enthusiastic screw-up in over his head; Spade is the overqualified, sarcastic sidekick; the whole thing doesn’t exactly write itself, but it writes enough for the comic set pieces to shine. Moreover, Farley and Spade have strong enough byplay to fill in any gaps between those big slapstick moments, making all of that dumb plot machinery run unusually smoothly.

As it turned out, neither Spade nor Farley would be able to match Tommy Boy again; Spade has never had such easy chemistry with other costars, and Farley, tragically, was dead just a few years later. A quirk of the SNL star machine is that even at its peak, it seemed equally capable of feeding its alumni into proof-of-concept star vehicles (like Meatballs or 48 Hours) or all-in Hail-Mary plays that wound up proving the exact opposite (think of Carvey in Opportunity Knocks, or Chris Kattan in Corky Romano) – even some that are kind of great (think of Norm Macdonald in Dirty Work). Between Billy Madison and Tommy Boy – both movies about underachieving scions of industry, by the way, making them perfect children-of-Lorne texts – the former feels more like a potential one-and-done. It’s weird and janky and lets Sandler do all kinds of off-putting stuff, while Tommy Boy feels more like an approximation of a “real” movie (cinematographer Victor J. Kemper shot Dog Day Afternoon and The Candidate, in addition to comedy classics like The Jerk and Clue).

But Sandler went on to a robust 30-year movie career, while Farley, well, that story is sadly familiar. That also lends Tommy Boy a bittersweet quality; though two more Farley vehicles did almost identical business before his untimely death, this is the only really good one we got. You can see his puppyish eagerness to please, to succeed at this ridiculous job, all over (and outside of) his character. In his other starring roles, Farley often seemed like he was being put through the wringer, sweating and tumbling for a paycheck. In Tommy Boy, even moments of punishing slapstick are performed with a lightness of step that indicates how graceful he could be at his core. That’s where the sweet part of bittersweet comes in; not every comedian’s work is so well-preserved by a single enduring movie. Farley’s former costars Hooks and Hartman are both gone now, and neither ever had a starring role in a movie quite so beloved. With a sadly modest body of work, Farley’s one-hit wonder is also a one-stop shop for understanding his appeal.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.