Rob Schneider hates to say SNL was “over” after Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton covered “Hallelujah,” but he said it anyway
The former SNL cast member spoke about the post-2016 election late night moment in a new interview
Aux News Kate McKinnon
Taking a break from Adam Sandler’s multiverse of Netflix films and lecturing civil rights hero John Lewis about Martin Luther King Jr., comedian and The Hot Chick star Rob Schneider has decided to join in on the always occurring online argument of: is Saturday Night Live even good anymore?
In a recent interview on Glenn Beck’s podcast (via Mediaite), the SNL alumnus believed the late-night sketch show was finished after Kate McKinnon performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as Hillary Clinton during the cold open of the first episode after the 2016 presidential election.
“I hate to crap on my old show,” Schneider said. “I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’ And there was no joke at the end, and I went, ‘It’s over. It’s over. It’s not going to come back.’”
Not only does Schneider think SNL isn’t giving top-tier comedy like the good ‘ole days, but he continued to call out the long-running series and other late-night talk shows as “indoctrinating” viewers, saying, “You can take the comedic indoctrination process happening with each of the late-night hosts, and you could exchange them with each other. That’s how you know it’s not interesting anymore.”
Schneider’s history of distaste for SNL’s political portrayals isn’t anything super new, as the actor claimed that the show was “showing their hand” too obviously with Donald Trump’s presidency in a 2018 interview with the Daily News.
“The fun of Saturday Night Live was always you never knew which way they leaned politically,” Schneider said. “You kind of assumed they would lean more left and liberal, but now the cat’s out of the bag they are completely against Trump, which I think makes it less interesting because you know the direction the piece is going.”
All of this seems to be some high positioning for a guy who played great comedic characters like… Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo and that unnamed hotel bellman in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York. There’s also his role of The Annoying Guy Who Is Wrong, allotted to him by John Oliver after an interview surfaced of Schneider loudly (and wrongly) claiming that government-mandated vaccines on kids were “against the Nuremberg Laws.”
346 Comments
Sounds like a cool guy to be around right now.
You would be wrong with that assumption!
Robbie! Roberino! The Robber, Robocop…makin shit takes!
“I will scroll past the take.” Adopting this as mantra.
Dude sucks but that was insanely corny
He was not unnamed in Home Alone 2.“Cedric, don’t count your tips in public.”
Is he wearing denim pajamas?
He’s actually naked. That’s his skin..
oh my!
Not only does Schneider think SNL isn’t giving top-tier comedy like the good ‘ole days
Do you really think ‘ole is the way it should be written?
It’s a contraction of ‘good swole days,’ so yes.
is this is a Joe Piscopo reference?
I can’t find any source on that
They meant the good Ole! Days
He tried to kill me with a forklift—olé!Yeah, that looks right.
Yes because it’s literally correcthttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ole
There’s no apostrophe in that. The correct spellings are ole and ol’. Not ‘ole. The apostrophe goes in the place of the missing letter(s).
There’s literally no apostrophe in the dictionary spelling you linked to, although there is in the citations. Weirdly, Merriam-Webster citations “are selected automatically” and may not represent best practice.In English,an apostrophe in a word generally represents one or more elided letters and there are no letters missing at the begging of ole.
What’s the apostrophe for?
I thought he meant that ole wasn’t correct, indicated by some replies that take it as ole! like a Mexican exclamation.
Not with the apostrophe, which indicates that the professional writer has no idea what function apostrophes serve.
You realize there’s no opening single quotation mark in that entry, right?
Maybe he’s pining for a bullfight.
If Rob thinks the SNL writers these days are bad, he should set up a Zoom call with the current AVC crew. He wouldn’t even need to fly to LA (where they all were forced to live) to do it..
This what happens when people who have never read anything but social media posts somehow get an actual writing job
I swear AVC’s office is just a row of toilets in California somewhere with free wifi, where the staff just come in for their morning cable-lay, scroll Twitter a bit, and then squeeze out an article on their iPhone while they’re squeezing out an equivalent text in the bowl below.
There’s no need to be gross
It’s just a colloquial spelling of it, nothing to get pissy about
I love that that’s all you took away from this article. That sounds sarcastic but I truly love it. I’m just imagining how your brain broke when you saw it like, “Is she for real? Am I being punked?”
I mean, Rob Schneider sucks, but he’s not wrong in this instance. That was a really embarrassing/cringey moment for a comedy show.
Yeah. I feel like they could have gone the way Hamilton did where the cast as individuals (as themselves) came together at the end did something if they wanted to speak out. But any commentary on her loss in the context of the show should have been done from a comedy standpoint. You can make a joke about a tragedy if you are talented enough.
Or you didn’t get the joke that people were taking Hillary’s loss way to hard.Hey, at the time we didn’t know then how bad Trump would get!
Leonard Cohen had just died, so it was sort of about two bad things that happened, but yeah, commenting simultaneously on two bad things ≠ comedy.
Yeah, I didn’t get it. Like hey, Hillary, you fucked up big time, and you lost the election. Go away.
I love revisionist history, she totally “lost the election” and wasn’t hamstrung left and right, also voters bear totally no responsibility whatsoever!
Hillary lost to Donald Trump. That has to make her, objectively, the worst presidential candidate in American history.
And forgive me for thinking that the people with actual political power bear more responsibility for the state of things than random nobodies who are barely even given a substantive choice to vote on in the first place.
“That has to make her, objectively, the worst presidential candidate in American history.”She wouldn’t even make the top 5 even if you restricted it to post-1945.
The stink of splinter still lingers it seems.
If voters didn’t have a big impact Trump would still be president.
The American people (Well mostly white people) are the ones that elected him president, don’t pretend like idiots on the left weren’t falling for and spreading republican misinfo from almost 20 years ago ( Splinter was one of such places )
Hell the comments section of AV Club was filled with Jill Stein supporters (many of whom, oddly enough, seemed to disappear not long after the election, hmmmm)
I mean lets not forget the editor of splinter was dating one of the guys from chapo trap house.
Seriously? She was a horrendous candidate who couldn’t get out of her own way. I know “but her emails!” is a fun rallying cry but the fact is if she’d just acknowledged that she conducted some company business on her personal server and apologized for the lapse eight months before the election then she wouldn’t have gotten caught multiple times lying about it. The icing on that cake was the late-inning reveal that many of those emails found themselves onto Anthony “Dick Pick” Weiner’s computer, thus tying her to one of the sleaziest Democrats one can think of. Lying about “taking fire” on an Iraqi runway. Fact is, everyone thought she was a pathological liar. She has zero personal touch with voters, and pulled a great Romney move bashing people who don’t think like her with the “deplorables” comment. I could go on for paragraphs but we all know the stats. The Democrats cleared the decks for her after Obama came out of nowhere in 2008 because it was “her turn” and paid for it. The idea that she was somehow wronged (prompting McKinnon’s Hallelujah rendition) is laughable.Shitty. Candidate.
Oh I see you’re an idiot.
What a complete retard you are. This take has aged like cottage cheese in a nuclear reactor.
Haha. Yeah, how’s that “lesser than two evils” working out for ya?Hope you’re enjoying that new Supreme Court, left. Couldn’t have done it without you!
You’re making a whole lot of assumptions based solely on one undeniably true assertion made by the commenter: that Hillary Clinton fucked up. The proof that she fucked up is that she lost to Donald Trump.
And who exactly do you think you’re winning over with all this sanctimony?
What are you talking about? Of course I voted for Hillary. She was very qualified. She just ran a shitty campaign at the exact moment in American history when the Democrats could not afford to run a shitty campaign. There are books on it. I recommend “Shattered” by Jonathan Allen.
Also there was literal foreign interference in the election along with the shady ways social media influences politics- the same thing is how the Phillipines just elected the son of Ferdinand Marcos to the presidency
I mean, it was a close election, and any one of the many things that happened could have thrown it the other way.
Democrats almost always run a shitty campaign. They ran a decent campaign with Obama (who also had the luck of being up against dull candidates) and that’s the last decent one I can remember. You can’t blame that all on Hillary. The DNC ran a shitass campaign and the RNC ran a nearly perfect one.
Jesus Christ, you have to be the worst kind of petty to still be dividing the left over that shit. Shut the fuck up.Edit: Damn, and their response just completely shattered the strawman you were still clinging to from 6 years ago. You’re everything wrong with the neolib base.
This is fucking dumb.
Try this again, but in English.
Or how about: Hey America, you fucked up big-time, and here we are?
Oh goody, we still blaming “The Witch” for 2016? Good times.
Why is “The Witch” in quotation marks? Is that just a lazy strawman you’re trying to create?
But… it wasn’t about Hillary. She did it as Hillary b/c that was the character she had been playing all season. But the moment, as cringe-worthy as people find it, was a (very accurate) “oh shit, we’re in dark dark times” moment.
She warned you the election would be close, and you ignored her. She warned you Trump supporters were evil, and you criticized her. She warned you that civil rights would be revoked if Trump was elected, and you dismissed her. She warned you Trump would be controlled by , wanted to undermine NATO, and could not be trusted with the nuclear codes, and you accused her of lying. Finally, she warned you that the fake news used to attack her would eventually turn deadly, and you hated her for it.Someone fucked up big time, but it definitely was not Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, most people on the left feel exactly the same as Rob does in regards to this specific thing.But also, hate to say it Rob, but SNL was “over” a long time before that.
Pretty sure he was involved with that decline too.
Don’t make blanket statements. Most people on the left, how would you possibly know most people? Personally I like the show and could care less what direction Schneider goes. Not a big loss.
I’m not writing a term paper here, I left a comment on the internet. You’re not my teacher, stop grading my comment like one.
Here’s another “one person’s opinion,” then: the sketch was cringe.
Back when AVClub was still as clever as The Onion, they would have put the photo of the Worst Person You Know meme up for this newswire bit rather than Schneider’s putrid mug.
Ten-thousand percent. I don’t need a somber, elegiac moment from a show that *checks notes* let Trump host. If ever I wanted to tell a show to F*ck Right Off, this was that moment.
SNL died when they played the collaborationist buffoon and had Trump host the show.
Absolutely, the Trump episode was the more important nodal point. Things like McKinnon’s cringy Hallelujah (and Cecile Strong singing To Sir With Love to Obama) happened because SNL was trying to make up for having promoted Trump.
Exactly. Hallelujah was SNL trying to play the same card as so many collaborators by saying, “We didn’t *really* know!”
It was a lovely, cathartic moment.
The Hillary piano sequence felt like they were trying to make up for the fact that they let Trump host the damn show less than a year earlier. And that they led off that episode with a sketch where Trump had been elected President and America had become a utopia as a result.
I don’t think the Hillary sketch “ended” SNL (it was one crappy sketch, they’ve done dozens of crappy sketches every year for decades) but it was an embarrassing low point. If they had to do a joke-free opening, they should have just had a cast member come out and say “Holy shit, we’re sorry, we didn’t think he would actually win.”
Yeah, they could’ve have Pete Davidson do it. He wasn’t that great a cast member, but he was pretty good at the self-referential commentary, both on him as an individual and on the show as a whole.
I would definitely tune in to see 7 minutes of Pete Davidson apologizing.Hell, it wouldn’t even be that hard to make it funny. Like, start out with a sincere apology for the Trump thing, then escalate by apologizing for a bunch of over-the-top fictional things SNL has done wrong (“sorry for the time we had Joseph Stalin on as our musical guest.”)
The first actual sketch was better and made a concrete point: it was Dave Chappelle (ah, 2016, simpler times) and Chris Rock watching the election returns with some white friends, and their interaction can be summarized asWHITE PEOPLE: Holy shit, I had no idea other white people were this racist.BLACK PEOPLE: …have you not been listening?
Television News Anchor: We project Kentucky will go to Donald Trump.Beck: Yeah, well, of course he won Kentucky. I mean, that’s where all the racists are.Dave: All of them are in Kentucky?
“All she needs to do is come back and win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. I think I’m going to grab a Xanax. Yeah, the maybe the whole bottle.” Neal Brennan wrote that brilliant sketch and it is a traumatic thing of beauty. It still gives me PTSD to this day.
Them letting Trump host reminded me of the old Eddie Murphy bit about white people getting drunk and voting for Jesse Jackson as a joke, then waking up saying “he fucking WON?!!”No one took Trump seriously at that point.
Nah, a lot of people took Trump seriously. There were protests asking the show to un-invite him, but they were ignored by NBC.I think part of the problem was that Trump had his own show which ran for years on NBC, so a lot of the folks who ran SNL were used to seeing him around and thought of him as just another harmless performer. There was definitely some out-of-touch showbiz bullshit going on.
As I recall he himself has tacitly admitted the candidacy was initially a publicity stunt. Regardless, at the time he may have been considered a buffoon and a shady dealer but we didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.
There needs to be like a 20-year moratorium on covering Hallelujah for any purpose. It’s a breakup song about someone Cohen used to get off hard with, ffs
He’s wrong because he’s done plenty of less funny and/or more explicitly indoctrinating work than this thing he is pretending to criticize for those reasons.
Well there’s a wrong side and right side of history. Trump is the wrong side of history. Do you really want Trump and the GOP becoming fascist rulers of America? There was nothing funny about Hillary losing to that orange psychopath. She got the most votes by the people. She was more popular than Trump. The EC elected Trump.
If McKinnon had just done the song as herself, it probably would have seemed powerful and poignant, but her doing it in character as Hilary was so weird.
Was it the on same show or a later one that featured a sketch about a gathering of people watching 2016 election night returns and having two African-American people laughing and wisecracking cynically as the rest of the group, all white “people of the Left”, expressed shock and horror as Trump pulled out a victory?
It was smug beyond belief. Like “Ohh, this is really going to make America weep and think about what they’ve done.”
No, he’s wrong. It was ONE bit, and the show did NOT collapse. And that was 6 years ago. You’re both just misogynists.
Yeah, this is a real “stopped clock is right twice a day” kinda story. It’s still far and away one of the most (if not THE most) cringeworthy things I’ve seen put on actual TV and not some bad internet video.
The thing is, he wasn’t mad because it was cringey. He was mad because it was implicitly criticizing his boy
No more cringey or embarrassing than the fact that we elected a fucking reality TV con artist.Oh, did I say “we”? That implies that he won the popular vote. Which he didn’t.
He won the popular vote in more states than Hillary did. Running up the numbers in CA and NY means fuck all when you lose swing states.
It’s so so obvious that it’s what they were going to do if Hillary won, but since she lost they just told her to do it “sad”
But Hallelujah is already such a sad song. I can’t imagine they’d have wanted to use it as a celebration?
It was indeed, but it wasn’t the sky is falling bad like he’s saying. It was embarrassing and hard to watch for sure, but hardly the tipping point of the run of the show.
What message did you assume from it that was embarrassing/cringey?The point of that cold open is pretty open to interpretation considering the lack of context. Maybe it was just trying to be silly? Maybe it was mocking how seriously Hillary took herself? Maybe it was just an earnest piece of art and not intended to be comedic. There are so many ways you could interpret something like that. I’ll never understand how people get so insistent upon their one knee-jerk interpretation with open ended pieces of media or art…
One thing that’s been forgotten is that it was partially a tribute to Leonard Cohen, who had died that week
SNL has never been good, we just remember the good parts.
‘SNL has fallen off in recent years’, another inspired and original take from The Deuce. Where would we be without this fresh insight?Lots of things suck when you just boil them down to one skit/character and throw away everything else out there…Right, Robert?
Indeed. A supposed satire show that unironicly makes something that cringy and itself deserving of satirizing was proof, if it was needed, that SNL had lost whatever meaning it once had.
I would say he sucks and IS wrong- he’s going on Glenn Beck’s show to reinforce that SNL is trash and unfunny because it has partisan politics, which is the typical “you’d actually be funny if you both sides the topics, instead of making fun of my ideology!!” BS that conservatives obsessively spout.
Sure but the show is 90 minutes every week. Not every sketch is going to be a hit. That was bad. The show clearly was never up to writing about Trump winning. (Or Trump generally). But it’s far from the worst moment. They’ve had worse. They did plenty of earnest, sincere, no jokes material after 9/11 but since that’s pro Guiliani and pro right wing, no one cares.
“Hmmm, my entire career has been based on Adam Sandler’s charity, and that well is only so deep these days, and I’m getting older and taking way less calls than the few I used to get… what can I do here? I know, I’ll go full MAGA pundit, claim that I’m being canceled for my perfectly normal and mainstream views, and then do a bunch of direct-to-Bible-bookstore-bargain-bin movies with Kevin Sorbo! If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get to be in a scene where I feel up Gina Carano!”
Ahhh… the Jon Lovitz method. Brilliant.
ACTING!!!!!
GENIUS!!!
BEAUDELAIRE!!!!
LOL! Noice!
YEAH THAT’S THE TICKET
How ironic that a guy who’s public persona was built on lying and insincerity became a political commentator!Wait, that’s not ironic at all, is it?
Well, it’s ironic in that Alanis Morissette way so, I guess…? =)
It used to be a comedy sketch.Now it’s a Fox News training video.
Wait. Lovitz has gone full MAGAt? Noooooo!
From what I could look up, Lovitz is a centrist Democrat; he just buys into all the “cancel culture” handwringing & doesn’t like when people point out that rich people cheat the tax code.
No, Lovitz is personally liberal. But one of those aging liberals who bitches about cancel culture and his precious taxes.
nothing_of_value_was_lost dot jpeg
Eh – Lovitz has a lifetime pass for beating the shit out of Andy Dick.
And Victoria Jackson.
Dude might actually be tapping his way out of Sandler paychecks.Sandler’s obviously lazy, but no one he’s worked with has an unkind word to say about the ma.
Or he can try to sponge off his daughter’s money.
It really does seem that as comedians age and lose their edge, they tend to drift into reactionary politics as the last way they can shock people.
Where does YOUR entertainment career/bank account stand compared to his? Just wondering.
And your show business career is where, compared to his? lol
Rob out here in the greys trying desperately to own me.Edit: cool looks like Kinja broke their image upload feature.
A broken clock can be right twice a day (I guess maybe in this case once a day). Maybe if she had taken a bat to the piano at the end or something.
A broken clock on military time is only right once a day, so there ya go.
In reality that was the cringy-iest of the year ,but the show was dead long before that
Schneider is an idiot. SNL has always been political and I am not sure their politics were well hidden. At best, Schneider was on at a time when apolitical bits were probably a bit more prevalent, but I think that had more to do with the writers’ sensibilities.That being said… that McKinnon bit fell flat. It wasn’t clear whether it was a joke, a lament, a setup to a punchline or anything else. Schneider is right it didn’t work, but for the wrong reasons. I disagree with him, but a better argument would have been Trump’s appearance which was 1) unfunny 2) cringey to watch and 3) tried to capitalize on the Trump interest in 2015 (back when I naively thought he was running to feed his ego but wouldn’t actually do it) and ended up promoting him. That whole show was an abject failure as a comedy show and politically, rather than a single failed sketch from McKinnon where you could tell where the heart was, even if you couldn’t find the comedy.
Even the funniest guy on Earth can’t make conservative American political comedy work. The material never coheres into anything but name calling and “kids these days” type grandpa rants.
SNL has always been conservative political comedy.
But “liberal American political comedy” works really well?
Liberal American comedy at least sells. There’s a pretty clear throughline from The Daily Show’s Indecision 2000 to the setup of every modern late night show and the dozens of comedy news hours shows that have proliferated in the last decade. Lately I think it’s been a lot staler than funny, but used to be much funnier before the existential dread really set in.The conundrum is that comedy is by its nature pretty political, but comedy about politics is very hard to do well. It’s much easier to half bake something while name checking a few politicians than to sit down and study what they could do to make them funny. 30 Rock had a great gag about it modeled directly after Tina’s Palin impersonation. Look, this comedian looks like the politician: Sketch complete.
“it’s been a lot staler then funny” is where Schneider is spot-on. Monologues during the Trump years (and really continuing to this day in many cases) were almost completely interchangeable. It’s like the shows all shared a writing room and just handed the jokes out each night.
There’s at least as much difference between Fallon and Meyers as there ever was between Letterman and Leno.You want to talk fucking stale, try your formative years being the nightly fucking Dancing Itos.
I dunno man, politics ain’t Newton’s laws of thermodynamics or whatever, I dunno why some dorks always think it’s gotta be equal and opposite on either side of the aisle. Consider pairing this reading with: a chilling out.
The Colbert Report was only one of the most successful shows in Comedy Central’s history…
And now The Late Show is a boring and milquetoast as the rest. Colbert needs to stick with satire.
The funniest part is all the conservatives who were shocked to learn Colbert was a liberal. The satire flew completely over their heads because they have become so extreme that they’re now living parodies of themselves.
SNL has lasted 47 seasons. The Daily Show has 27. Simpsons, 34. Let me guess, you probably don’t think any of those are ‘liberal’.
Don’t forget jokes about how much you hate your wife.
Wife bad.I identify as [blank].Did you just assume my gender?
That’s because comedy is about punching up and mocking power. Rich white guys founded this country and have been controlling it for over 200 years. When you have that much power, there are no opportunities to punch up because you’re the top. There’s a reason the CEO can get roasted at the company Christmas party and the janitor does not.
To be fair, when Schneider was on SNL the politics were hidden under Chris Farley’s mountain of cocaine.
Jack Handey is a national treasure and I will send a pumpkin with a knife in it to anyone that disagrees.
One reason they did that song was because Leonard Cohen died the week of the election.
Well said!
Also, he’s shitting on an entire show around one character and one skit. IMO, that’s kinda shitty but hey that is his brand of humor.
They tried to do a Leonard Cohen tribute (he had just died) and they were in shock over Trump actually winning. They biffed it. But it’s not the first time.
“I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’ And there was no joke at the end.”I mean, isn’t that the general critical response to nearly anything related to Rob Schneider in some fashion?
How dare you say that about the guy who says “You can do it all night long” in several Adam Sandler movies.Nobody’s makin’ copies of you, mister.
Well, Mr. Dog, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No awards of any kind … Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous AV Club Poster Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.
Stop hitting yourself
A shame that I’m not willing to dox myself for a weird Rob Schneider devotee, because you’ll never know the funniest and most ironic thing about what you said.
I refuse to believe that Rob Schneider actually has fans, so I’m on Team Fever Dog Is Rob Schneider Himself.
(that was from a letter Schneider wrote to a critic…look it up)
Could be Adam Sandler, it does come have that same kind of incoherence and anger some of his bits used to have.
I did gigs in comedy clubs in the middle of the country where Schneider is often booked as a special event. The B rooms in suburban cities. Toledo, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc.He PACKS these places in. Makes a healthy five figures for one show. He literally opens his show by saying “Let’s get this out of the way…You Can Do It!!”The room. always explodes with cheers when he does. They adore him. The average comedy club patron is not found in NYC or LA. They’re in the burbs and smaller cities. And Schneider, along with Tim Meadows, Chris Kattan, Steve-O (yep), Marc Price (Skippy from Family Ties), John Lovitz, and others play those areas for good money and packed venues. Screech was not a good comic…at all…but he always sold out the venue. I mean packed the room. Jimmy Walker somehow still fills seats, despite his claim to fame being saying “dy -no-mite” 45 years ago. He gets paid EXTRA if you want him to say that or use it in ads. Charges audience members for photos with him, and they line up for it.I’m not remotely exaggerating.
Schneider sold out four shows in Toledo 5 years ago, all within days of the announcement. No one cared how good he was or wasn’t. They just loved being there watching him.In 2016, Schneider sold out a large theatre show in Montreal for the JFL festival. Even that supposedly prestigious organisation (it isn’t) didn’t care about his actual show. They knew it would sell tickets.
I can tell you didn’t get my reference. Please look it up. The story will make your day.
Did you know: Rob Schneider thinks vaccines cause autism. I’m not trying to be funny, I’m just saying this dude is a fucking idiot.
It was never a secret the show leaned lib dem generally because republicans by nature are a lot easier to make fun of, but they’ve mocked pretty much everyone. But yeah, Hillary’s Hallelujah was fucking awful. And Rob had one bit… maybe two if you count “you like-a da juice”… that was kinda entertaining til it wore out its welcome. It’s interesting that the put-upon republicans always seem to appear AFTER their careers tank. Republicans and scientology, hunting down people at low emotional points to recruit into their weird ideologies.
worst person you know said a thing, etc
If anything, SNL lost its edge way way before this. I remember back in 2002 when they were doing bits about how dumb the UN was for *not* supporting the US invasion of Iraq. After that bullshit I have no absolutely no faith in the show’s ability to make any kind of cogent social commentary through comedy.
There was that whole weird neoliberal bit where the guests at a party start dancing because the US successfully invaded Kandahar. That whole era of media is weird and cringe-inducing, so it’s not limited to SNL.
I definitely do not remember those bits. That seems profoundly implausible.
Go on Peacock and watch the episodes around the first time Matthew McConaughey hosted. It’s definitely there.
Yeah, probably not going to invest time to watch terrible old SNLs to discover that there is some sketch whose message you got wrong.Given how much anyone with half a brain could tell that the Iraq invasion was a manipulated sideshow that the rest of the world was wise to not get involved in, it’s not remotely credible that SNL ever wrote a skit whose point was to mock the stupidity of the UN in that context. That’s absurd. At most, there may have been a skit about how the U.S. was lying about Iraq to the UN that also included some lame ethnic jokes about various UN countries. Anything past that didn’t happen.One obvious sign that your memory is questionable: we invaded Iraq in 2003.
Matthew McConaughey / Dixie Chicks, Season 28, episode 11: February 8, 2003. You don’t have to believe us, but if you first say “I don’t remember this” and then say you aren’t willing to invest time to go back and look, why do you care enough to comment?
Okay, I checked it out, and I can definitely say now that you misremembered or misrepresented the sketch. Happy?That cold open is a serious of hackneyed jokes about the ineffectiveness of the UN, diplomatic spending, and immunity. It is, I suppose, about the UN being dumb. It is NOT about “how dumb the UN was for *not* supporting the US invasion of Iraq.”You okay?
https://www.onesnladay.com/2020/04/15/february-8-2003-matthew-mcconaughey-the-dixie-chicks-s28-e11/https://snltranscripts.jt.org/02/02kun.phtmlIt *was* the 2002 season, but the skit is more about the UN ignoring the US’ intentions, the delegates not taking the proceedings seriously and generally being very rude. Not quite a pro-Invasion sketch, but a very stupid and toothless one.
I watched it. It’s a generic “the UN is silly” skit tied into that week’s big UN-adjacent event, but it doesn’t remotely criticize the UN for not backing the invasion.I didn’t deny the existence of a skit about this, just this dude’s super obviously bogus explanation of its messaging.
Honestly, even if the skit was about that, I wouldn’t hold it against SNL. From Canada — we get a lot of US media up here — it felt like Americans were suffering from mass hysteria.
I remember very little opposition to the war outside publications like The Nation. There was also Chomsky… uh… Chomskying, but aside from that, it was all: Let the bombs fly!
Yeah, I agree. Being incredulous to American media at least tacitly supporting the Iraq War during that time is a bit of convenient memory loss on par with pretending that most white Americans actually liked Martin Luther King before he died. Terrible things are often just really, really, really popular in this country, y’all. Let’s remember that Dubya was RE-ELECTED, shall we? And it wasn’t even close.
Yup, and honestly, a skit about the UN being ineffectual certainly would have played into the narrative that was being promulgated by the Dubya administration at the time: that the weapons inspectors were incapable of keeping WMDs out of Saddam Hussein’s hands.Not exactly pro-war, but not exactly anti either.
Yeah, we may be facing a fascist GOP, but at least the left is fucking ALIVE now. What the hell were leftists in this country doing from 1980-2008? Hiding under rocks?
Well, here in cosmopolitan, blue state America, almost no one thought that invasion was legitimate. Overwhelmingly, people believed (correctly) that Bush was using the more legitimate war in Afghanistan to avenge himself on Iraq for its slights to his father and/or to let his advisors that were holdovers from his dad’s administration get what they wanted.Damn near half the country felt this way. It’s weird that this is getting so Mandela effected.
I remember. That made Congress’ near-unanimous support, along with the quasi-nonexistent opposition in the media — what I was referring to in my reply — all the more baffling.
Maybe you weren’t watching the right media.
Could be, though polling showed support for the invasion oscillating between 50-60% post-911. Fox News and CNN coverage was eerily similar, down to the punditry. Same goes for network news. Heh, also the NYT. What a mess that was.I only really remember leftist publications like The Nation and people like Chomsky as major voices of opposition. Who am I forgetting?
Well, at no point in my life have I ever watched cable news, so I’m not sure about that, but there were plenty of prominent opinion columnists, at NYT, WaPo, and plenty of other places, who were against the invasion. Then you have your Jon Stewart types, etc., not to mention things like SNL playing up the “payback for daddy” angle, if not questioning the WMD intel.At the time, Colin Powell was really considered to be a pretty unimpeachable source, which explains why a lot of people who really ought to have known better went along. Generally speaking, though, you don’t see 100% media alignment on topics for which the audience is evenly split.
I remember the voices of dissent at NYT and WaPo feeling pretty marginal, but that’s admittedly subjective. The Daily Show was against, yeah.Not saying there was 100% alignment, just that it felt — from here at least — like the pro camp was drowning out the anti camp. I also do remember, anecdotally, US friends and acquaintances commenting on how they felt less in favour of the invasion when they watched foreign news (Canada, UK, etc…)In reverse: watching US news from outside the US was profoundly strange because of how strong a voice the pro side had.
lol
Incels are weird.
Cool retcon, lib
Incels are weird.
You’re a dupe
Incels are weird.
Lol delusional
Incels are weird.
“I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’…”Just imagine that, Rob Schneider, watching SNL at home (as he usually does every Saturday night), a mere minute into that performance, being so distraught at this unfunny bit of political toothlessness, he threw his body from the futon, and supplemented to the gods that something else was happening on his television, rather than the affront before him airing on NBC.
“andd that unnamed hotel bellman in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.”uhhhh…its CEDRIC!
Don’t count your tips in public.
I listened to this episode with Glenn Beck (shudder) and Rob’s recent Fly on the Wall episode with Carvey and Spade and I gotta admit, for the guy best known for “Kevin! Kev-in! The Kev-man!” he really handles himself well in long-form interviews. Fly on the Wall was a bit of an eye-opener in that regard because he didn’t talk politics and was allowed to weave long, interesting stories through the constant interruptions of the show’s hosts (the Glenn Beck podcast kept going back to right-wing talking points and washing Glenn Beck’s balls, which makes sense for the audience for that show I suppose). Meanwhile, I was really surprised that two of our most well-regarded working comics, Mulaney and Carmichael, were out to sea in the latest podcast interviews I’ve encountered (Mulaney on Fly on the Wall; Jerrod on WTF). Mulaney provided a lot of dead air and stammering, which caught me off guard for such a normally quick mind, and Jerrod seemed completely out of sync with Maron and overly snobbish about his work (I’m sorry, I mean your “art,” Jerrod).
Schneider is a very articulate guy who can go on at-length discussion of issues he’s passionate about (See: His published rebuttal to Ebert’s demolition of the second Deuce Bigalow film.)The issue is, he’s also profoundly stupid and decides to go to bat for the stupidest things.
given the state of his career he is REALLY missing the boat if he doesn’t go after a paid commentator role on OAN, Fox, etc. They need ALL the help they can get trying to be funny. It’s really sad and pathetic, like if Henny Youngman were alive and trying to be relevant.
I will never miss an opportunity to link to Roger Ebert’s very sweet column of thanks after Schneider sent him flowers when he got sick:https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/a-bouquet-arrives
I miss Roger Ebert. The discourse was so much more civilized when he was still with us, and this column is a good reminder why.
Also, people can be brilliant in some areas and dullards in others. Ben Carson actually is a generational talent in medicine, for example.
So, Schneider is Joe Rogan’s non-union equivalent?
I was uncomfortable for Mullaney. That was horrible.
I saw Jerrod at Will Ferrell’s comedy fundraiser at the Greek Theater a few years back. Everybody else was pretty funny or at least entering, but Jerrod took a hot take on MeToo, I think it was, and bombed. He was gutsy for committing, but there was this air of “I don’t have to be here for this shit, fuck it”.
So go tour with Goat Boy and be done with it.
Schneider went on to say, “Indoctrination derp dee derr! Derp dee doo, da teedity tum! Hillary do derp da do ta derp da do!”(It really is a testament to Schneider’s talent that a South Park parody consisting of nothing but random noises is the funniest thing he’s ever been associated with.)
“…rated PG-13.”
Wasn’t he a stapler?
And a carrot!“I’m a carrot!” – Rob Schneider in “A Carrot.”
As fashionable (and easy) it is to rag on Schneider, SNL’s comedy compass has been out of whack for the last six years. It’s toothless. Per example; McKinnon would regularly impersonate Ellen and the second there was something legitimately spoofable about her and her actions, she dropped it and never did it again.
You can always age a commenter pretty easily by where they think this show that has been spinning its wheels for at least four decades when awry. People my age would say that it had been unwatchable for easily two decades before your estimate. The reality is mostly that the show has been the same kind of garbage forever, but you don’t notice it until you reach a certain age.
It’s weird because my era of SNL (~2000)produced mostly players that I hated at the time. I thought Will Ferrell was an idiot, and couldn’t stand Chris Parnell or Chris Katan. I only really liked Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon because I thought Weekend Update was the funniest part of the show.
But I already thought the show used to be much better with the older cast when I was too young to even watch it or appreciate it. I think Comedy Central used to air syndicated reruns, so I must have caught some of the late 80s/early 90s stuff there. I’m not sure if Matt Foley is actually any smarter or more sophisticated than Mary Katherine Gallagher, but it sure used to seem like a world of difference.
Even in the seventies it was hit or miss. There were some golden moments back then, but probably half of the shows were unwatchable.
Yeah I agree with this. I binged watched from the beginning a while ago but couldn’t get past the second season. It was really incoherent and often not funny. Of course there were classic hilarious bits but mostly it wasn’t that. Just like it’s always been.
The tricky part of the CC reruns of SNL (at least the ones I saw) is that they were edited down by 30+ minutes, so they were only showing the best bits of any one episode. So intentionally or not it makes the old episodes look like they’re more hit than miss.
and couldn’t stand Chris Parnell or Chris Katan.I was pretty ambivalent about Chris Parnell on SNL, but he’s shown how funny and talented he is since then – especially with his great voice work.But Chris Katan… yeeesh was he bad. The weird thing is, it’s not like he was some forgettable bit player. He had some of the most popular recurring characters of that era: Mango, Monkey Boy, Butabi guy.
Your takes sound generally right to me. Though I think I mostly gave up on SNL before you did.
Ferrell always grated on me, and honestly still does. I couldn’t name anything Katan has done. Same with Parnell’s SNL tenure, but he has been great *after* SNL.
The general rule of thumb is that SNL has been “going downhill” since whenever the speaker was in high school. Fortunately, my high school years corresponded with Tina Fey’s tenure as head writer, so I think my case is stronger than most, but there are inevitably defenders (and detractors) of any era.
You could back it up to junior high for me – I remember laughing at SNL a lot when I was about 12, then there’s a lull for about 25 years, and then there’s that sketch where Billie Eilish and Kate McKinnon are advertising a creepy hotel.
Weird, I wasn’t in high school when the second episode aired.
Absolutely. In a similar vein, conservatives tend to idolize some point in the past without realizing that this point was when they were living off their parent’s generosity and hadn’t really started their career. In other words, when the living was easy and they didn’t really need to consider the real life challenges others were enduring.
I refute your formula.The last time SNL was good was during the tenure of the previous cast. The show was exceptionally strong with Tina Fey as head writer, which then continued into Seth Meyers’ run. Bill Hader, Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Jason Sudeikis, the later Ferrell years… The list goes on. It was as good as, even better than IMO, the original cast. The show now is dreadful by comparison… Strike that, the show is dreadful full stop.I wasn’t in high school when this was happening. I’m not going to date myself here but my age rhymes with schmorty schmee.
It hasn’t been good since Phil Hartman left.
A perfectly adequate cast member.
…earthly existence.
Yeah, it’s a weekly 90 minute sketch show on network TV that’s been on the air for almost 50 years. It’s had literally hundreds of writers. It has no particular voice or perspective, and while there are invariably enough hits every season to put together a decent best of compilation and some personalities stand out, it’s sort of designed to be grown out of and then rediscovered by a new generation. If you tried to watch Seasame Street every day for the last forty years, you’d probably think it sucked since Don Music left.
I’m not saying that this is surprising, I’m saying that most people don’t assess its historical quality objectively; they believe it got bad right after they aged out of thinking it was good.
I know; I’m agreeing and adding that SNL’s core audience for at least 30 years was people allowed to stay up late on Saturday Night but not really allowed to have late night plans, or approximately 13-16 year olds. But it’s a weird quirk of society that while nobody blames Sesame Street for not holding our attention as we do our taxes, SNL is apparently supposed to remain evergreen across decades.
The best season of SNL is the one before you got your driver’s license.
That’s because McKinnon legitimately worships Ellen, was allowed to be “friends” with Ellen because of the impression, and would never do anything to jeopardize that by lampooning Ellen’s travails the last couple of years.
That remark has a “fresh from the colon” air about it…
That’s kinda the problem. McKinnon is possibly one of the top comediennes…ever, but she doesn’t know how to acknowledge the shortcomings of people she likes.
SNL’s comedy compass has been out of whack for the last six years.
Or, you know… 26. Sometimes it’s still funny. I think sometimes it always will be. But it’s been hit and miss for awhile.
But SNL never had the luxury that SCTV had, wherein everything that happened on SCTV was focused on Melonville. Even if they wanted to do something about, say, the USSR, it was because the Russkies took over the Melonville tv station. I would argue that that focus was part of what made SCTV a better show. Also SCTV’s comedy style was gentler, smarter and not cocaine-fueled.
SCTV and ostensibly every other sketch show also has the benefit of not doing a live show every week. There’s a lot more time for them to refine sketches, and do more than one take of stuff.
100% this. Also, rose colored glasses are basically a biological reflection of how the brain works. We tend to focus on and remember all the good shit (even when it was bad). All the mediocre and middling crap tends to get wiped by the fucked up hard drive that is our brain.
not doing a live show every week.
Oh for sure. And SCTV filmed in … Toronto I think? Anyway, not exactly a small town but not NYC. Many cast members have reflected on how work-centric that life was – they didn’t do a lot of partying, and the cast also did most of the writing/production stuff. So there wasn’t anything to do but make the best show they could. And they did.[And isn’t Scorsese working on a documentary on SCTV? Someday?]
You say that because you’re a trumper.
This idea that SNL was once great is largely a myth based on selective memory. People only remember the really good skits from whatever era they happened to be watching and forget all the bad ones. In my opinion, they’ve been pretty consistent since the first season, with peaks and valleys. If you just look at the funniest skits, you can find some from across the entire run. Kate McKinnon’s alien abductee skits make me laugh just as much as Celebrity Jeopardy, or Chris Farley’s motivational speaker, or the Land Shark.
the last six years.Extremely generous. It has been off and on for decades.
It may be toothless, but I honestly thought there were a lot of funny sketches the last couple of seasons. Almost all of which had nothing to do with politics.
The only thing almost as old as SNL is people who don’t watch it complaining that it isn’t funny anymore. And proving Lorne Michaels correct when he said everyone thinks the best years are from when they were in high school.
“Hallelejuah” has become the International Anthem of Sadness, but it’s about a broken, bitter relationship with heartbreak and sexual metaphors. It’s both maudlin and weird when it pops up all over as a… in major media and crowd events the saccharine SNL performance mentioned, Olympics ceremonies in Canada, on and on.
Also, as already mentioned in this thread, SNL let Tump host during his campaign. So, Lorne, you don’t really care for music, do you?
It’s also an open mic nite song that should be banned along with Wagon Wheel and the Adele thing.
Are you honestly telling me that when you hear “she broke your throne and she cut your hair and from your lips she drew a Hallelujah,” you don’t think about Donald Trump?
Ever seen Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’? Good. Don’t..
Wasn’t it also like… the same week Leonard Cohen died?
Cohen was a genius, but people need to stop with the goddamn Hallelujah covers. The lesson of Jeff Buckley making a big chunk of his career on the success of his version shouldn’t have been “hey, I should sing this too, even if it’s the millionth fucking cover of this song people have heard,” it should have been “maybe I should delve into some Cohen deep cuts and see if there’s another diamond in the rough in there just waiting for a more mass-audience-friendly voice and popular-style arrangement to make it into a hit!” Find your own goddamn “Hallelujah,” hack singers.
What you should do with Cohen is take his shitty songs and make them good, like Greg Dulli did with “Paper Thin Hotel”
I always thought the lesson of Jeff Buckley was “learn to swim”
Yeah, there was a fairly moving version done at the COVID memorial in Washington, but because of the original lyrics, at first all I could think was “Well, at least y’all meant well…”, hehe.
But on further reflection, I think the “exasperated with the seeming hollowness of the world precisely because you have hope for it” dark blues tone of the original song fits well with a memorial to deaths that were preventable save for our tolerance for stupidity.
Because it’s not for joy; instead, you see, that the one thing that connects you and me, is a cynic’s desperate, lonely Hallelujah.
I like “Hallelejuah” but it’s no “W.A.P.”
I would assume Lorne now feels that having Trump host was a big mistake.
Cohen is overrated anyway. People revere him mostly because they feel it makes them look like they know and appreciate lofty music. Few will ever name any of his albums or more than three songs. The fact is he barely sold any records and lived mostly on reputation and praise. Great writer, but the songs are often one-note spoken word numbers more than anything. Cue the random Cohen fans who will name songs and albums they adore. I don’t doubt he has serious fans. But he’s ultimately the artist people invoke to make themselves and their musical tastes look deep and pretentious.
Rob Schneider is a piece of shit, and he is otherwise completely wrong about whatever “indoctrination” bullshit he’s whinging on about. But, in the specific case of McKinnon’s “Hallelujah” being vomit-inducingly terrible…he’s not wrong.
However, given that his entire career is vomit-inducingly terrible, I don’t think his criticism of this is salient.
Takes one to know one?But yes, this is definitely a “heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point” moment.
I’m not sure how great a point it is to discuss how, 6 years ago, a show did a jokeless bit that didn’t have a joke. It’s also not super salient to accuse a show that let Donald Trump host in an election year of indoctrination because they let a character play the other candidate in a bit that didn’t work.
Sorry, I was referring to the ClickHole headline/meme. (https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/)No, it’s not even a great point. It’s just an accurate observation on a very cringey SNL bit that practically everyone else shares.
Dumbass Clock is Right Twice Every Day
Oh yes, a lesson in what real comedy is from the “makin’ copies!” guy.
Rob Schneider’s still alive?! I thought he died a long time ago … shit.
Republicans aren’t funny and neither is Schneider.
Not a fan of Bill Maher, but I do approve of him shutting down Rob Schneider in this podcast interview. I kept yelling at the screen, say something Bill! Don’t let him get away with it and thankfully Maher did.
You know Rob Schneider is a bullshit artist when his excuse for being with the GOP and Trump was that he always roots for the underdog. The one that’s not in power needs defending, according to him. Well, I can prove this statement is B.S. When Trump and the GOP had all the power. Rob Schneider was supporting Trump and the GOP and you were still attacking Liberals. So STFU, Rob! You’re a product of Ronald Reagan. You never evolved.
Hasbeen says what?Seriously, why pay attention to anything this 3rd rate troll says.
what the hell was in the water at 30 Rock during that stretch of SNL that produced such an esteemed group of conservative heavyweights like this guy, Victoria Jackson, Dennis Miller, Sandler, Spade, and Lovitz if I’m not mistaken?
I think the sole shared season for all of those reprobates is 1990. Must have been just all the 80s businessmen dumping their end of an era cocaine and spare money in the Hudson.
Lovitz is still a Democrat, he just has the typical whining about “cancel culture”. Which for most aging liberals with bad views (see Chappelle, Dave), is simply a symptom of some people’s getting-old-itis, or copying Principal Skinner’s “No, it is the children who are wrong” bit from the Simpsons without a sense of irony.
I get that a lot of what we are seeing with comedians is that they have an instinct to not shy away from, and in fact should run face-first into, controversy especially when it might attract attention (and/or be good material for a “bit”), but I really wish some of them (John Cleese especially who actually used the term “woke” derisively the other day) would simmer down, this is not the hill to die on.
I feel like citing cancel culture has become an easy way for people to dismiss the observation that the left has come unhinged in its inability or unwillingness to engage even in nuanced discussions. Disagree with the party line you’re a bigot, a _____-phobe, a generally horrible human being.
I feel like the “left” you’re describing, at least as it exists in the US, consists of folks who, due to cultural shifts and the mass communication brought by the internet, can simply now be a part of the conversation about what their boundaries and identities are. This is still new for, confuses and, frankly, irritates those used to being the only ones defining them. Let’s not forget that the Right, even in places where the left holds sway, fundamentally still owns the conversation, because so many people’s and peoples’ rights to exist and to have their voices heard have to be consistently re-stipulated and re-justified even in those areas. The centrists of the Left’s political establishment are desperate for right-leaning votes in a way that the Right could give two shits about, either about the Left’s chances of success at that goal or at the prospect of the Right losing its base to the Democrats. So we’re always avoiding talking about taxes like it’s some boogie-man. Sounds like the Right is far more in control of our conversations than the left to me.
As such, pretending that the American Left is some unitary construct that can actually impose narratives on people that don’t want them, in a way that constitutes any real power, despite all the inter-necine bickering and competing ideologies, is pretty rich. Especially while the Right far more uniformly continues it’s downward spiral to fascism because it doesn’t know how to say “no” to the followers of a big orange baby, for they’re all that’s left.
Some of the left is still able to talk about socialism as a positive without having a stroke. I think that implies far more openness to discussion than the self-righteous mandates from the Right, who often by their very platforms generally presume their god, color, or class given rights to authority. It ain’t the Left stacking judicial benches, that’s for sure. I’m not quite sure your feeling like certain defenders of trans rights are being too strident with Dave Chappelle rises to the same level of concern for me.
I of course can care about two things. I just don’t really think I should care that much about the latter. Because you can usually solve the latter with more conversation. Or often, just more listening.
Why do you think of Sandler as conservative? I don’t understand.
I have seen several stories online saying Sandler leans conservative (allegedly he is a registered Republican but that’s from back in the day when some of them were sane). Now I know he is smart enough to protect his brand by not appearing either way but that’s what I have read. Could be wrong, which is why I added “if I’m not mistaken” at the end of my comment.
I see. With his style of comedy, it’s hard to pick out any broader message…
It stopped being fun Rob when a psychopath became President of America the GOP and his supporters normalized it. All morals went out the window and they were fine with as long as their side won.
Am I really supposed to believe you’re a Christian when this was okay for you? You laughed and kids were in the crowd. If Obama had done this you would have called it out and called for his impeachment. You’re all phonies! It’s only about your side winning.
SNL used the “Hallelujah” opening to acknowledge the pain of the loss. There wasn’t a joke at the end because electing that guy was and will forever be a stain on our country. However, SNL trying to show some level of sorrow flies in the face of what they did each week in normalizing his behavior and the type of person he is. When the “grab em by the pussy” tape dropped they had a great chance to open the show with a somber plea for women experiencing sexual assault to reach out to various organizations but then it became another in a long line of “isn’t this guy funny?”
I feel like Hallelujah was the wrong song for that, though. Maybe “Atrocity Exhibition.” Or “Riverdeadbank” by Current 93.
It was a sign of what was about to come with respect to political “comedy,” though. Every late night show would routinely interrupt the monologue with “I need to get serious here for a few minutes, because this is just too important…” followed by some predictable inanity. The shows all ran together and became boring as hell.
lol
this Dude is a real ANIMAL
Gee, “thanks” for reminding me that Glenn Beck and Rob Schneider still exist.
Definitely peak White Women Instagram.
This isn’t going to be this isn’t going to be a popular take, because I do agree it was a cringey moment. But what she was expressing there was what a lot of women felt, what we knew was coming, and what eventually happened on June 24, 2022. No it wasn’t cute or funny, but a lot of people felt like election day was another 9/11.
I’d absolutely agree with that. I remember a lot of Americans I know who were posting about that clip around the 2020 election day and talking about how much that moment meant to them.
If you read through the comments, literally no one is defending that piece as actually good. No one liked Kate McKinnon dressed as Hillary singing Hallelujah. We’re saying:-It wasn’t bad because it had a political POV, it was bad because it was cringe and not funny. -The show has done plenty of cringe and not funny, sometimes in service to the right.
LOL Sorry but I keep reading your reply and I still can’t figure out what your beef is.Also, when I posted the comment they were like 50 comments and now there’s 253 so I don’t know if you think I should be coming in here and like, posting updates or something ???
The massive amount of late-night jocularity around Trump really helped to desensitize everyone as to how REALLY bad he and his MAGA Trumpism are for this country. The MAGA are united in rage at anything non-MAGA, whereas many non-MAGA want peace and quiet, or a good laugh, and just figure we’re all laughing at Trump’s “antics” so how bad is it really?
It’s really bad.
chud has bad opinions, news at… *checks watch*… 3
““I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’ And there was no joke at the end, and I thus proved that there is no God, which my new target audience doesn’t appreciate for some reason.”
This is quite the fall for Rob since his uncredited cameo in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.
I read a lot of SNL memoirs. Schneider’s never done one, and he wasn’t interviewed in the Shales and Miller oral history, but the stories other people tell about him are fascinating. He used a jeweler’s loupe to examine his sushi before he’d pay the delivery guy. He so pissed off famous nice guy Phil Hartman that Phil threw him against a wall. He used to have screaming matches with Al Franken.What I’m saying is, copy guy’s got layers, man.
When you peel away the abrasive dick, there’s another layer of abrasive dick. He’s like an onion, in that every layer is just more onion.
so… a dick onion?
I mean, there’s a reason Rob Schneider isn’t the one who played 3 different characters on NewsRadio.
He was never funny and owes his entire career at SNL and after to Sandler’s charity. Seriously, go to his imdb and find how many things he’s done that aren’t either starring Sandler/Spade/Farley or produced by Happy Madison. The sooner he’s “Did you know he was Elle King’s dad” the better off we all are.
That and serenading Obama with “To sir, with love” were both absolutely mortifying.
That was the scariest thing I ever saw, and I spent three years in a Northern Vietnamese prison camp.
You were the warden!
Yup. True, true.
That said, neither of those incidents meant that the show was never funny again. It is regularly still funny. It doesn’t always hit–it never did–but it still can be brilliant two or three times per episode.
It’s cool that Schneider is the critic we should all be listening to in regards to SNL. You know, Schneider, the worst character to appear in any of the Sandler oeuvre? Ans that says a lot.
That song is almost entirely about frustrated sexuality. This was up there with Reagon playing “Born in the USA” or the various MAGAs playing “Bulls on Parade” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”“Remember when I moved in you and the Holy Dove was moving too and every breath we drew was Hallelujah.” Think about those lyrics and think about Donald Trump. Yea, this was dumb.
See, that’s exactly why I’m one of the few people who thought it did mostly work. It wasn’t about how Hillary would’ve been such a great president and it’s sad that we get Trump instead; it was about the tragedy of a politician who’s on paper impeccably qualified but just can’t connect with people the way she needed to:I did my best, it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel so I tried to touch.
I told the truth—I didn’t come to fool ya.
I see what you’re saying, but with all the “grab them by the pussy,” I would have avoid any mention of politicians trying to touch.
Schneider loudly (and wrongly) claiming that government-mandated vaccines on kids were “against the Nuremberg Laws.”…. Do explain how it’s wrong. Please. I would love to see your data. Go ahead. Of course you won’t.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-nuremberg-mandate/fact-check-covid-19-public-health-measures-do-not-violate-nuremberg-code-covid-19-vaccines-are-not-experimental-idUSL1N2ST1XP
Even if SNL is over, it still lasted longer than the hot second of Rob Schneider making cop-ies.
I’m not sure it’s been good since the 90/s early 2000’s
Sure it’s easy to dismiss Schneider because of his own work- but it doesn’t mean this isn’t true. SNL, especially the cold opens, have been news updates with out the real comedicreasoning to do so. It’s very annoying to lead with that every week. I remember reading an interview with Schneider when I was like 12-13, where he said ‘stick a fork in The Muppets, they’re done’… and I was like nah, they are gonna be great forever… but I guess he was right about that too.
This wasn’t the greatest sketch in SNL history but I get that they were trying to capture the sadness of the moment while also paying homage to Leonard Cohen, who had died that week. This was not a point as low as having for host Paris Hilton, Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
On one hand, it was cringe af. On the other fuck this idiot.
EVEN if you think SNL was better when you were [in high school/it was less political/etc] you can’t deny it’s just one of the most interesting shows around. I can’t really think of any other long running shows people laugh at, talk about, complain about, etc. on a regular basis… (and even less I regularly send my mom a link to as well)
At this point SNL is like Kim Kardashian… famous for being famous, but otherwise, there’s no “there” there.
Unfortunate reality one: Everyone who’s been on SNL says something like this sooner or later.Unfortunate reality two: Rob Schneider has no talent and was only funny when he was on SNL in sketches that exploited the fact that he has no talent.-An Anonymous Nerd
Why is anybody listening to what this Stapler has to say?
What was wrong with the song? I thought it was a great performance and it was.
As much as I hated that “Hallelujah” cold-open at the time, and as much as I still look back on it and cringe, it’s because of Hillary Clinton’s loss that Roe v. Wade was overturned, so while the bit was misplaced for a comedy show, they weren’t far off in being worried.
As much as I hated that “Hallelujah” cold-open at the time, and as much as I still look back on it and cringe, it’s because of Hillary Clinton’s loss that Roe v. Wade was overturned, so while the bit was misplaced for a comedy show, they weren’t far off in being worried.
Had to get to the vaccine part to find something I disagreed with him on.
Roooooooob, Robbie, RobberINO… makin’ dumb statements.
“The fun of Saturday Night Live was always you never knew which way they leaned politically,”That was the fun? I thought it was the jokes.
Jokes? On SNL? Since when?
Around the same time it wasn’t clear which way it leaned politically?
It was so funny reading the SNL oral history book because folks like Jim Downey really believed their political commentary was meaningful, when it’s always been crap. It’s superficial broad-based parody that’s essentially always acted as a performance vehicle. The good ones like Bush and GWB are good only because the performer essentially creates a brand new character out of their mark, but there’s no real commentary. It’s mostly, Biden and Reagan are old and slow, Ford was a dumb klutz, Obama’s smart and boring, Palin’s dumb and looks like Tina Fey, etc. SNL does a lot of great stuff but political commentary has always been its most vanilla element.
Using politicians as jumping-off points for jokes, drawing from their personas, is by far the best way to go. Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford was a good example. Guy was an All-American center at Michigan, for crying out loud, but fell down the steps once and SNL made him a klutz. The best was probably Hartmann’s Ronald Reagan bit where he’s goofily hosting a room full of school children, then as soon as they leave immediately becomes a hardass strategic genius.
That Hartman sketch is absolutely hilarious. And like you said, it’s more creating a new character. SNL’s takes on Obama and Trump are so uninteresting because they’re so literal. Pharaoh and Baldwin do generally good impressions, but there’s no new character being created. Whereas Key and Peele took Obama, who look is a hard dude to make funny, and went creative with the anger translator anger, such a great premise for someone whose main attribute is calmness. Meanwhile, George Bush should theoretically be as boring as a guy can be and Carvey made him a classic character. But even when an SNL political sketch works, it’s because of the character, not because of any interesting point they’re making.
GHWB never said “wouldn’t be prudent,” and most people honestly believe GWB used the word “strategery.” More people probably associate Al Gore with “Lock Box” than anything he actually said IRL. Heck, the Carvey / Farrell skit where GHWB considers shooting his son in the back during a hunting trip rather than let him run for president probably hit pretty close to the actual family dynamic that people suspected, given the two men’s personalities. Yes they had to look and sound somewhat like the real versions, but it’s hysterical that they could capture the essences of those people so well that it replaced reality. The best recent one was probably Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, just aggressively ripping the press corps new assholes for minor perceived slights. “GO SIT IN THE CORNER WITH CNN!”Long way of saying that straight impressions are boring.
fun fact: Even W thought he said “strategary” at one point.
I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’ And there was no joke at the end, and I went, ‘It’s over. It’s over. It’s not going to come back.’In which Rob Schneider perfectly encapsulates watching a Rob Schneider movie.
Why do people care? He’s washed up, even for one of Sandler’s buddies. Also, that Kate Mckinnon song is still funnier than his entire filmography.
what’s interesting, when Rob Schneider was on SNL they had E Jean Carroll as a writer, one of the victims of Trump’s Sexual Assault.
I think people are just taking his word on what the intentions of the Hillary sketch were, but I always thought they were making fun of the people distraught over her loss, including Hillary Clinton. It was an absolutely over the top and incredibly pretentious bit. I guess it was to subtle for Rob? Maybe if she sat on a whoopie cushion?
So he’s saying SNL today isn’t like it was back when he watched the show?Hot take!
Both the guys in this interview suck, but he’s still right about that bit. It was embarassing to watch and made no sense. Even if you wanted to have some kind of serious moment to briefly lament the fact that Trump won the election, this was just an awful way to do it on several levels. It portrayed it like the tragedy was that it was sad for Hillary Clinton, and it was just jarring having the combination of a recurring goofy parody character and playing the whole thing so seriously. I actually don’t know how nobody at any point could have pointed out it was awful before it got to air.
Wasn’t that musical number supposed to be a tribute to the recently deceased Leonard Cohen and not any sort of political statement? I think even this website at the time said it was a classy way of just avoiding commenting on the election at all.
I’m sure they thought they were capturing two moments in a somewhat clever way, but I’ll venture very few people in the current audience knew who Cohen was. All they saw was Hillary feeling sorry for herself.
I’d say it was “over” when they had cheeto host.
Rob Schneider has become the South Park parody of him.“Rob Schneider de derpity derp!”
The guy from All That Jazz? I thought he died.
Look the “Hallelujah” moment sucks as bad as he’s saying, but for my money the worst moment from this era of the show was whatever the FUCK that RBG tribute was.Seriously, that shit was flabbergasting.
The only available joke there would have been to riff on her unwillingness to retire while Obama was president and the balance shift that followed, but no way SNL was touching something that real and raw.
Cringe
Says the guy who was part of the second worst cast in the history of SNL.
Rob is out here stating the obvious: “I don’t care about my career.”Yeah, we know, guy. The highest rated movie in your IMDB Know For list is Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and it has a 5.7 out of 10 rating. The success of his entire career is entirely based on playing a random guy in Adam Sandler movies. He can really go ahead and sacrifice that for his politics. It would change nothing.
that unnamed hotel bellman in Home Alone 2: Lost In New YorkWait just a minute. He was not some unnamed, anonymous hotel worker. The man’s name was Cedric (pronounced “See-drick,” at least if you’re Tim Curry).How dare you.
Cedric.
Don’t count your tips in public.
He’s a fucking hack and a scum bag magachud. He deserves a bullet. Fuck you for giving him free press.
For me the reason the McKinnon thing was offensive is because she played Hillary as a careerist entitled bitch for the entire campaign, but after Trump won McKinnon dressed up as her character to Heal The Nation. Sorry Kate you were part of the problem
She had it right the first time.
I liked it. But I guess I’m the only one who remembers that Leonard Cohen had died, like, 3 days before? I saw it as just as much a nod to him as the election. I think it’s good for a show that is weekly and can respond to current events to be sincere once in a while. It was a very dark time and I imagine they had to throw out whatever they had planned because no one really thought he would win. *Shrug* I am willing to accept that I am in the minority on this one, but a large portion of the country was in shock and it felt like an appropriate way to address it in a cathartic way so they could move on to the standard SNL fare. But I do agree with a critique of SNL for letting the big idiot host the damn show the previous year, making light of and helping enable the thing that they were then lamenting. The McKinnon bit was almost an over-correction in the other direction as penance.
I just hate the song “Hallelujah.” An ex-girlfriend told me it was beautiful because it was about sex. It was in Shrek for some reason. Some people think it’s a religious song. I just think it sounds creepy.
Not sure this is the one Clinton event… And then again SNL will come back if it survives as it has MANY times before – everything is cyclical. Reg Schneider and his politics – I take it with as much importance as most of his characters. As far as the media who will publish anything as actually having meaning to get eyeballs – no thanks.