Adam Sandler addresses “Saturday Night Live” song lyric calling out antisemitic musician: 'Sadly, there's been a few'

Turns out, Adam Sandler didn't necessarily have just one person in mind when crafting a scathing lyric about an antisemitic musician in his Saturday Night Live 50th-anniversary special song, "50 Years."

In the emotional, funny, and at times cutting ditty meant to appropriately commemorate the show's long history, Sandler sings at one point, "50 years of finding out your favorite musician is antisemitic."

When asked by Vulture if he had any particular musician in mind when writing the song, Sandler demurred, "Well, you know, whoever wants to grab that one, it's up to them. I can't say a specific, because, sadly, there's been a few."

Sandler may not have had any one person in mind, but one person certainly appeared to think it was about them. After the special aired in February, Ye — the controversial rapper formerly known as Kanye West — wrote in a now-deleted tweet, "Adam Sandler, thank you for the love.”

Ye had earlier that month shared multiple inflammatory posts on X writing that "Hitler was sooooo fresh" in one message, while another included a call for followers to "CALL ME YAYDOLF YITLER AND YOUR BITCH STILL WANTS TO F---." In another message, he claimed that Elon Musk "STOLE MY NAZI SWAG AT THE INAUGURATION" of Donald Trump.

The timing of Ye's posts and the line in the SNL song shortly thereafter led many — including, it would seem, Ye — to guess it was referring to the rapper.

Sandler co-wrote "50 Years" with SNL writer Dan Bulla, who also played the keyboard during the performance on the anniversary special. The song netted the duo an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics.

The two packed a lot of history into one song, but was there anything in particular they feel like they missed?

"We had some extra, but we knew there was only so much time," Sandler told Vulture. "There’s nothing that we kicked ourselves in the ass about after this. There’s people you want to thank and people you want to mention in the song, but maybe they didn’t fit the rhyme, or whatever the hell it was."

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Bulla, who joined Sandler for the interview, added, "That’s the only thing: In that section, there’s a hundred other people you could have said. But we were sitting there saying, 'You can’t kick yourself for that, or you’re gonna go crazy trying to do it.' But we were definitely trying to be conscious of people throughout the show who were honored in different ways and not feeling too much pressure to mention somebody great who we love if we knew, earlier in the night, they had their own thing, and they were going to be celebrated."

He concluded, "So we tried to get a good balance of that. But, like everything else with the show, there’s so many great people and so much great stuff. You can’t drive yourself crazy trying to take care of all of it."

SNL50, a three-hour celebratory 50th anniversary special retrospective, aired on Feb. 16. The final episode of SNL's 50th season aired on NBC on May 17.

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