”I’m a ‘90s liberal, which makes me a right-wing fascist now.”
One of the most recognisable faces of Gen-X comedy, Rob Schneider has been a mainstay of American culture for over 30 years.
Rob was catapulted to fame by three years in the cast of SNL, alongside fellow legends Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Norm MacDonald, and Chris Farley - a run that would earn him three Emmy nominations. Leaving in ‘93, Rob transitioned to films, appearing in the likes of The Waterboy, Big Daddy and 50 First Dates, as well as starring in his own star vehicle: Deuce Bigalow.
More recently, Rob has become something of a political commentator. Cutting away from his peers, he has become increasingly outspoken in his opposition to childhood vaccines, transgenderism and woke culture, as well as his Catholicism and his support of Trump.
Why did we invite him on?
”It’s gotten dangerous. We have to have gun checks at comedy shows now.”
In one of our first interviews post-Trump’s 2024 win, we invited Rob on to share his thoughts on the President, the left, and the divided states of America. It proved to be not only our most popular interview of the trip, but in the history of our show - as of the time of writing, it boasts over 2.4 million views on YouTube.
From that, we can glean that not only do we love talking to Rob, but you seem to appreciate it too. We had to have him back. One year on, there’s so much more to talk about.
What did we discuss?
“There’s a Chinese proverb: ‘May you live in interesting times’… We are certainly living in interesting times.”
The amount that has happened in the last 12 months is, frankly, baffling. Even discounting the West and the world more widely, just looking at America… so much which could not have been predicted this time last year has come to pass. The Epstein scandal, the 12 Day War, which spiralled into the conflict we’re seeing now, the splintering of the MAGA movement - it’s an overwhelming shift.
”The realisation for the liberals that they have lost power is still sinking in. The useful idiots are still protesting, doing their ‘No Kings’ demonstrations … And also there’s a wake-up call for the Republicans that, just because the party is in power, they can’t do all the things they want to do. There are impediments to power.”
Still, if there’s any respite, it’s this: it’s hard to imagine a more ripe time for parody than the age we find ourselves in. Everything is absurd, and the shackles of wokeism have been broadly relinquished. Popular comedy is once again edgy, shocking and, for better or worse, mean.
It’s an unsurprising return to form. After years of censorious scolding, the reaction was always going to be a pendulum swing, equal and opposite in its force. Rob, as a comedian with over thirty years under his belt, warns that the right’s humourists might have missed the key lesson of the woke era…
”In American comedy, we’ve got to be careful. We’ve come out of that COVID tyranny, but all the best stuff about Peter Cook and Monty Python is that it was silly - silliness is king. I fear there’s a lot of serious creeping in, and I think the audience is noticing. I have to be careful too! I have to be careful that I’m not just throwing slop to the conservative masses.”
One of the most significant figures in the pushback was (and is) Dave Chappelle. Arguably the most acclaimed and influential comic of his generation, Dave’s return to comedy in the mid-2010s was initially greeted with universal praise. That soon faded - in Sticks & Stones, Dave began to make jokes at the expense of transgenderism, something he’d double-down across his following specials. Describing himself as “Team TERF” in The Closer, comedy’s greatest living icon made it explicitly clear that he wouldn’t be bowing to the mob. The inevitably 0% Rotten Tomatoes score swiftly followed, but the numbers didn’t lie - Dave was more popular than ever, and did as much as anyone else in his field to steer the ship back on course.
For that, Rob gives Dave all the adulation he can. However, he stresses that even the greats are not immune.
“Dave Chappelle is a genius, but I thought what he said about Charlie Kirk was disgusting. He was sh*tting on him in his last special [The Unstoppable…], making fun of the comparisons people were making to Martin Luther King. But that wasn’t Charlie doing that - that was other people. I didn’t like that…”
Rob’s repulsion to Dave’s comments is not rooted in a distant admiration for Charlie, but rather his close friendship. Talking about him now, Rob becomes visibly misty-eyed.
”Charlie is irreplaceable. I, honestly, as a comedian and a humourist and also a cynic, would get calls from his organisation asking me to be involved. And I was suspicious of it. But then I realised that he’d built an incredible organisation of young people. If you want to influence the future, if you want to return us to traditional American values, you need young people to understand the loss of not maintaining them … And that voice was silenced.”
Approximately zero seconds passed before hysterical leftists raced to drag Charlie’s legacy through the mud. Even today, Rob doesn’t understand it.
”I’m still wrestling with it [eight] months later… Charlie wasn’t like RFK, or JFK, or Martin Luther King. He wasn’t like these leaders who did amazing things but had flaws in their personality. You need those people - people to take big risks and put everything on the line. He was just a genuinely incredible guy. He was a gigantic loss for us.”
Whether you agreed with or even liked Charlie, only the most fringe and sadistic could see what happened to him as anything other than a tragedy. It could have been an opportunity for reconciliation; a bipartisan acknowledgement that things had gone too far and it was time to turn down the temperature.
That opportunity was not fulfilled…
