Making Copies: Rob Schneider’s Short Fall

For a guy who started his career on Saturday Night Live in the 1980’s having a stand-up comedy special airing only on Fox News may seem like a long hard fall until you realize that plummeting from SNL and into the right-wing abyss isn’t that rare. It’s happened to a throng of SNL vets over the years. Comedian Rob Schneider’s special “Woke up in America” (and isn’t that clever?) seems to be his coming fully out of the conservative closet. With lame tired Jokes that are him making copies of jokes by Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, and others and you know how a copy is never really as strong as the original. Mostly the jokes about women, gays, and trans people who are the current standup comedian’s and GOP punching bag. Schneider has jokes about how hilarious it is that people are angry that Conservatives led by GOP politicians and Trump gave them the Covid_19 virus by purposely spreading and letting it wash over America and comparing the current President Joe Biden to a dog that needs to be killed. Schneider’s jokes have never been cutting edge or particularly funny. It may not be because Rob is a bigot or racist but maybe because Rob Schneider has always gone for the cheapest and easiest joke he could find which are usually the most bigoted and racist jokes. In the early 2000’s Schneider had the leading role in a number of movies so technically he was, I guess, a movie star. The movies were stocked full of childish bathroom humor and ethnic stereotypes. Shneider’s full tilt switch to Republicanism likely started after he came under fire from certain marginalized groups for his insulting portrayals of women and ethnic characters mostly cameo roles in a string of Adam Sandler movies. Schneider has picked up the indignant “woke” and “Cancel Culture” falsehood football and is taking his ball and going home to Conservatism and all white audiences after being rejected by the “uppity liberals”. The criticism heaped at Schneider is not a case of political correctness its simply the fact that sometimes time just passes you by and time has passed by Rob Schneider. Certain comedians have now reached the white man losing their country point in their career and Rob Schneider is one of them. He is now content on passing the time by trying to be a right winger’s new favorite comedian, however tenuous because they tend to have a new one each week depending on how cruel the joke is about the people they hate the most. If Rob Schneider could have played those kinds of ethnic and marginalized characters and made them funny by giving them a purpose and turning the joke in on their oppressors, he might have had something and maybe been a real comedian but For Schneider the joke is literally “Look at this group, aren’t they funny? Being a woman is funny, being Asian is funny, being gay is funny. Well, being Rob Schneider certainly isn’t funny and neither is watching him. Now his purpose seems to be standing up as a sad freak show for MAGA and really that’s exactly right where he’s probably always belonged.