David Spade and the double act he keeps rebuilding without Chris Farley

David Spade

Photo: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 22, 1964 Birmingham, Michigan, United States
Occupation	Actor and comedian
Known for	The Emperor's New Groove, Hotel Transylvania, Hotel Transylvania 2
Awards	MTV Movie · Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

There is one sequel David Spade will not make. Someone pitched him a follow-up to Tommy Boy built around the grown children of the two original characters, with his own character steering them down the highway, and he said no. “I can’t find a scenario with no Chris Farley,” he told Theo Von on Von’s podcast. “He was the whole movie.” The refusal explains more about Spade than any catchphrase he ever delivered. His best work has always come as half of a pair, he lost his first partner young, and he has spent the decades since assembling new double acts without once pretending that any of them replaces the original.

The sarcasm had an origin. The boy who would turn condescension into a living grew up short of money in Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb built for people who had plenty. He had arrived there as a small child from Birmingham, Michigan, the city where he was born; his parents split up soon after, and his mother Judith, a writer and editor, raised him and his older brothers Bryan and Andy largely on her own.

He left Arizona State University for the stand-up circuit, and a set at The Improv in Los Angeles got him a small part in Police Academy 4, released in 1987, when Spade, born on July 22, 1964, was still 22. Dennis Miller then helped him into Saturday Night Live, where he started in 1990 as a writer and soon moved in front of the camera. There he found the figure he still plays, the bored gatekeeper. His receptionist at Dick Clark Productions met the most famous faces in the world with a flat “And you are?”, and his “Hollywood Minute” fired one-line insults at celebrities from behind a news desk. In a cast that also held Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and Rob Schneider, he became the thin, blond counterweight to Farley.

That pairing went to the cinema. In Tommy Boy, in 1995, Farley played the wrecking ball and Spade the man watching the wreck with one eyebrow raised; Black Sheep repeated the formula a year later, and the two shared the MTV Movie Award for best on-screen duo. A third film was planned. In December 1997 Farley died of an overdose at 33. Spade did not go to the funeral, and the absence fed rumors of a falling-out that he has spent years correcting. “I couldn’t have gone into a room where Chris was in a box,” he said later.

Television gave him the stability the cinema could not. As Dennis Finch, the scheming assistant of Just Shoot Me! on NBC from 1997 to 2003, he stretched the SNL receptionist into a full sitcom character and earned an Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe nominations. He voiced Kuzco, the vain emperor turned into a llama, in Disney‘s The Emperor’s New Groove, and wrote himself a mullet and a title role in Joe Dirt with Fred Wolf. After John Ritter’s death he joined the final season of 8 Simple Rules, then spent seven seasons as Russell, the single friend with no filter, in CBS’s Rules of Engagement.

His second long partnership was with a crowd rather than one person. Sandler brought him into Grown Ups and its sequel alongside Kevin James, Rock and Schneider, and both films were large commercial hits. He also became Griffin, the invisible man, across the Hotel Transylvania animated series, a role that suited a comic whose instinct is to stand slightly outside the frame and comment.

The case against Spade is not hard to build. His sharpest material was cruelty aimed upward, and sometimes it hit the wrong target: a Hollywood Minute joke in December 1995 that called Eddie Murphy a falling star cost him Murphy’s goodwill until a chance meeting in 2011. The Sandler years bought security at the price of ambition, and a drag role in Jack and Jill earned him a Razzie for worst supporting actress. Late-night television did not hold him either; Lights Out with David Spade ran on Comedy Central from 2019 to 2020 and was not renewed. Even Dandelion, his 2025 stand-up hour for Prime Video, struck several reviewers as oddly safe for a man whose reputation was built on the opposite.

Fame has had harder edges away from the stage. In 2000 a former assistant attacked him with a stun gun while he slept; the man later pleaded guilty. In June 2018 his sister-in-law, the designer Kate Spade, who was married to his brother Andy, died by suicide, and he gave $100,000 to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. He wrote about Farley, the assistant and the Murphy feud in his 2015 memoir Almost Interesting. He has a daughter, Harper, with the model Jillian Grace.

His current work looks a lot like the old arrangement in new hands. Since January 2022 he has co-hosted Fly on the Wall with his SNL contemporary Dana Carvey, a podcast of backstage stories that has already spawned a spin-off, Superfly, and he has been splitting a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace with Nikki Glaser. In April 2026 two films arrived a week apart. In Jonah Hill’s Outcome on Apple TV he plays Buddy, the neighbor of the troubled star played by Keanu Reeves. Busboys was more personal: a comedy he wrote, produced and paid for with Theo Von, with himself as Markie, one of two friends convinced that waiting tables will fix their lives. Spade put the budget under $3.5 million. With no studio behind it and almost no reviews, the film opened in roughly 800 theaters and took about $2.6 million in North America, a small figure that still made an argument for comedians owning their own work.

The next pairing is the oldest one. Since August 2026 he has been shooting Grown Ups 3 for Netflix, first in New Jersey and then in Italy, with Kyle Newacheck directing and Sandler, James, Rock and Schneider back as the same friends, now in their sixties. The story sends them to Europe to scatter the ashes of a friend who has died; filming was scheduled to finish in mid-October, and Netflix has not yet set a release date. A film about men who refuse to let a dead friend go quiet is, in the end, the subject Spade has been working on for most of his life.

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