prompt: crush, title: orbits in decay in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“Well,” Frank reasoned, hoping to get me out from under my bottomless self-pity for a moment.

“Look at it this way. At least you’re not Adam Sandler.”

To someone who has never been in or in long-term proximity to the entertainment industry, that probably sounds like rank absurdity. Adam Sandler is one of the most famous comedic actors of his generation, tons of hit films and records, doubtless hundreds of millions of net dollars earned.

He’s even become a fashion icon in certain spheres, his dressed-down casual looks in high vogue for sub-sub-communities of relaxed-but-masculine lesbians. You would think that success would be the literal dream for scores of naïve entertainment aspirants, such as I was myself, once.

“Y’know,” I shrugged at the sasquatch, “he was funny once, back in the day, at the beginning.”

“I’ve heard,” Frank looked a bit puzzled, “but it’s difficult to imagine.”

But he was, once, riotously funny. When his only job was to be funny, he was one of the best at that particular kind of knowingly-sophomoric winkingly-childish absurdity. And you can’t even blame The Curse of the Thirty-Mile Zone for most of his awful fate, he was thrust into limelight in Manhattan, after all, during the last gasps of “Saturday Night Live” being funny itself. Before all remaining scraps of effective comic subversion were dismantled by sickening waves of “just happy to be part of a legacy” Ivy League ladder-climbers, trying to prove to teacher-teacher that they are ever so clever and smart. Nothing funny about sucking up to the Trumps and Giulianis.

“Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, that song about that talking goat,” I smiled, “all pretty good.”

But you don’t even have to have had your dreams crushed by Los Angeles to know why it would be better to be an abject failure than be Adam Sandler. By now, they probably teach The Tragedy of Adam Sandler in schools, if not acting schools, then certainly schools of economics. The price of that level of fame, of course, is the burden of keeping all your old friends in business too. And at that level, also their lawyers and agents and hangers-on and whatever. A sun, orbited not only
by its planets, but also by the moons that spin around those planets as well. If you are supporting Rob Schneider’s descent into incoherent fascism, you could only imagine his sycophants’ needs.

When you’re Adam Sandler, you can’t afford to be funny anymore. You can’t afford to put time and effort into your work. You have far too many mouths to feed at that level of fame, you have to just churn out product until your orbiters are all dead or you are, whichever comes last. Pixels Part Two, Hotel Transylvania Part Seven, I’m sure there’ll be another Billy Madison eventually.

I felt my wallet in my left pocket, barely enough money in there to even afford Denny’s for the sasquatch and myself. “Well,” I thought, “Frank’s right at that. At least I’m not Adam Sandler.”