Rob Almighty

“I’m ridiculed and thought of as obscene but so were the post-impressionists. I’m not going to stifle myself artistically because of other people’s perception. Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship.”

Huh? If he hadn’t been speaking like this for the past twenty minutes I’d swear Rob Schneider was doing a bit.
Oh yes. Rob Schneider. The low fallutin’ star who once disappeared under Jabba the Slut (DJ Big Boy in drag) for Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, who ‘marked his territory’ and eyed a goat in 2001’s The Animal; and who initially made his name playing Sensitive Naked Man and Orgasm Guy on Saturday Night Live.
That Rob Schneider.
Sitting in a contemplative pose that works to offset the Buddha beads around his wrist, today Mr. Schneider is playing the sophisticate, the intellectual, the world traveller; in short he’s everything we don’t expect Mr. Schneider to be.
“Of course I’ve been to Ireland before,” he says with a note of nonchalance. “I spent two months here in 1984. I had read Leon Iris’ Ireland – A Terrible Beauty, an amazing book about the Irish history and became obsessed with the place. So I hitchhiked around and I found the Irish were just about the nicest people on the planet. They reminded me of my Filipino relatives. If I’d ask for directions the person would leave their store and walk me wherever I was headed.”
I point out that in 1984 most of the traffic was leaving this country, not the other way around.
“I know. I went around these decimated villages in the west where they speak Irish. But just look at the gigantic influence this country has had on literature. How could I not come?”
This just doesn’t add up. We’re aware that Joyce can be as potty-mouthed as Peaches with a stubbed toe but how does one of his disciples grow up to make his directorial debut with Big Stan, a prison rape comedy? Well, like many funny men, Mr. Schneider is, behind the laughter, a deadly serious fellow. Today, he repeatedly speaks not of his work but of his art. Indeed, he regards his Razzie for Worst Actor and the other rotten fruit he regularly finds himself pelted with as a manifestation of the film establishment’s unfairly dismissive attitude towards comedy performers.
“It’s ridiculous,” he says. “And it’s not confined to comedy. All I ever wanted to be was a character actor. But they stopped paying character actors in Hollywood. Nowadays that’s gone and most actors are lazy. And it works for them. They get recognition for work that isn’t in the same league as work by the great comic performers. Not that I’m comparing myself to them.”
He’s careful about that sort of thing. He uses that phrase – “not that I’m comparing myself to them” – several times during our encounter. He thinks Peter Sellers was gypped by the Academy on any number of occasions; “not that I’m comparing myself to him.” He has studied everything recorded by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Monty Python; “not that I would compare myself to them.” He is unappreciated just as van Gogh once was; “not that I’m comparing myself with that guy.”
He’s right to be precise with the semantics. Relations between Rob Schneider and the film writing community have been sour from the get-go. For many commentators, the 44-year-old actor is akin to something from the Book of Revelations, a herald for the very end of cinema, a prankster who has degraded the already lowbrow antics of his friend and frequent collaborator, Adam Sandler.
The feeling is mutual. Schneider’s venomous attacks on critics are, within that profession, near legendary. When Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times joked that Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo was overlooked for an Academy Award because “nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic”, Schneider responded with full page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter; “Patrick,” he wrote, “Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers”...if you sat with my colleagues... you would just be beaten beyond recognition.”
The situation became uglier still when Roger Ebert, the grand old man of the profession, waded in to defend his LA Times counterpart. “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified,” noted Ebert. “Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”
Schneider retaliated, dismissing Ebert as an “ass”. He even accused the sexagenarian of “not (being) nice to the people he works with.”
So far, so unappealing. And yet, Schneider was a perfectly good sport when South Park lampooned him with their ‘Rob Schneider is a stapler’ sketch. He is even happy to describe Messrs. Parker and Stone as “geniuses”. More touchingly, when Ebert had surgery to remove a cancerous salivary gland last year, the Man of Many Thumbs received a beautiful bouquet signed “Your least favourite actor, Rob Schneider.” What gives, I wonder? Isn’t Schneider supposed to be the scourge of the film reviewing guild?
“Thank you, I am,” he says. “And it’s a gift. The bad reviews used to really bother me when I was starting out. But I’m a Buddhist. I know how to run through different interpretations until I find one that enables me to live less negatively. I no longer have to please them. I don’t know if it’s jealousy or stupidity but they fail to understand that comedy is inherently arrogant. It’s not like drama. You’re trying to make people laugh. So it’s my way of not allowing those people to have power over me. It’s a liberating thing”
Schneider’s ire is by no means confined to ‘those people’. A committed celebrity pen-pal, he has taken out full page ads to defend Bill Maher’s right to free speech and to attack Mel Gibson after his unpleasant remarks in July 2006. Writing in Variety, Schneider promised as “a 1/2 Jew” to “never work with Mel Gibson-actor-director-producer-and anti-Semite”. He went on to call Gibson’s father “the Mad Max of Holocaust Deniers.”
Hmmm. For a chap who spends so much time railing against printed media, he sure is willing to boost that sector’s revenue.
“Yes, but if there’s a moment that’s right for satire or comment then I’m going to seize it. And I love the sense of revenge.”
Born in sunny San Francisco to a half-Filipina mother and secular Jewish father (...“jokes are better on dad’s side, cooking is better on mom’s”), Schneider was a precocious comic talent who was writing sketches and doing stand up while still in school. He quickly made a splash on the circuit as the opening act for such luminaries as Jerry Seinfeld and later, as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live.
On television, arch creations like Richard “Richmeister” Laymer made Schneider a star and catchphrase machine. On film, however, he has been dogged by controversy. His Asian caricatures, in particular, have prompted many missives from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) who did not take kindly to Schneider’s Japanese minister in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, nor indeed, his perpetuation of “...the tired stereotype that Asian men have small penises.”
Schneider, for his part, dismisses such charges as ‘ridiculous’.
“I keep getting critiqued for playing different nationalities,” he says. “But I’m always playing those characters exactly like I play American characters. It’s never just playing Japanese. I always do research and I’m always me playing Japanese as I would if I was a Japanese Rob Schneider. And I do have an Asian heritage. For this new film (You Don’t Mess With The Zohan) I kept getting guys to say my lines back to me in Aramaic until I knew how to sound like that in English. I’m respectful of other cultures and I hope people know that. But ultimately, If you’re an artist, you can’t be afraid to offend.”
To be fair, Schneider appears to be as complex an animal as his exotic heritage might indicate. A hybrid driving environmentalist who hates “liberal fascists” and despises Michael Moore (“a monster”) and George Bush (“crazy fundamentalist lunatic”) with equal ferocity, he is difficult to locate on either a personal or political map. In this spirit, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, his latest comic collaboration with Adam Sandler, is a broad feel-good sideswipe, where unsophisticated gags seek to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians.
“We wanted to make both sides laugh,” says Schneider. “I know it’s a comedy but it’d be great if people on both sides found it funny. That in itself would bridge the divide in some small way.”
Even when he’s outlining his good intentions, one can sense how weary he is of the press. When this writer expresses her admiration for The Hot Chick, in which our hero swaps bodies with the always wonderful Rachel McAdams, he looks as though I’ve started speaking in Esperanto. Evidently, journalists do not often use words like “I liked you in...” to Rob Schneider all that often.
“Oh,” he says. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I made that movie as a message for my teenage daughter. It was my way of saying it’s okay to be you. And I do love being different characters in the same movie. I love that whole Alec Guinness thing.”
And for one brief moment Rob Schneider smiles brightly before the drawbridge goes straight back up.
“Not that I’m comparing myself with Alec Guinness,” he protests.
Yes. We got that.