Adam Sandler's First Acting Job Was As A Forgotten Recurring TV Show Character

As with all the big stars, Adam Sandler's bustling career started from humble beginnings. Many are aware of Adam Sandler's presence on the small screen before making some of the best comedy movies of all time. He rose to stardom as a cast member on "Saturday Night Live" in the first half of the 1990s, a gig that made him so nervous he thought he was going to faint during his first "SNL" appearance. But in fact, his television roots go back even earlier. If you're thinking of his time as a performer and writer on the 1987 MTV game show "Remote Control," you're getting warmer, but you're not quite there yet.

The reality is that Sandler's first acting job, not to mention earliest ever screen credit, was as a recurring cast member of "The Cosby Show." The actor appeared in a batch of Season 4 episodes, where he played a character named Smitty, one of Theo's (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) pals at school.

Adam Sandler's Smitty had a fairly short stint on "The Cosby Show." Debuting in Season 4's "Dance Mania," and wrapping up with "The Prom" that same season, the character only has four episodes under his belt. Smitty was one of Theo's friends, and also very briefly dated Denise (Lisa Bonet). "Dance Mania" proved to be a pivotal episode for Theo's social circle, as it introduced Smitty and Denny (Troy Winbush) and saw the exit of Theo's longtime best friend Cockroach (Anthony Payne II). 

Needless to say, "The Cosby Show" is an '80s sitcom with a dark side, given the disturbing allegations that surfaced about the show's namesake. While the principal actors have weighed in on the controversy, what about someone like Sandler, for whom the show was only a minor step into a much larger career? In fact, he was asked about that very topic in a 2015 interview with Global Grind.

The interviewer wondered if Sandler agreed with reruns of "The Cosby Show" being pulled from television and streamers in light of Cosby's allegations, to which the actor replied, "I don't have a good answer for that, but I understand both sides of it, but I don't know what the right thing to do is."