Rob Schneider Tries to Make Peace With ‘Saturday Night Live’

“I hate to crap on my own show,” Rob Schneider told Glenn Beck back in 2022. But Saturday Night Live, the show that made him famous, was finished. Kaput. Dead on arrival. In a game of SNL Clue, Schneider said the killer was Kate McKinnon, the weapon was a piano and the location was the main stage at Studio 8H.

“Hillary Clinton lost, which is understandable — she’s not exactly the most likable person in the room,” Schneider said at the time. “And then when Kate McKinnon went out there on Saturday Night Live in the cold opening and all that, and she started dressed as Hillary Clinton and she started playing ‘Hallelujah,’ I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end.’”

“And there was no joke at the end,” Schneider said. Saturday Night Live was “over. It’s over. It’s not gonna come back.’” 

Schneider must have noticed that SNL somehow soldiered on since Season 42 despite his declaration of death. But it’s not so much that the Makin’ Copies Guy got it wrong, it’s that Saturday Night Live is “coming back to” its old ways, he told Tucker Carlson this week. “They’re making fun of Biden, and they’ve got a good crew there, a really talented new group.”

Falling into a rut happens to the best of us, Schneider figures. SNL is “an institution and like any institution, whether it’s a particular late-night show or a network or Saturday Night Live, any institution is going to be susceptible to this ideological claptrap.” 

Here’s the good news for Lorne Michaels: Schneider is ready to forgive the show. “I was angry about it,” he admitted to Carlson. But “I have to come to it from a place of peace and understanding if I’m going to help it. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’ve got to come from a place of understanding, tolerance, forgiveness and empathy.”

That’s easier now that the show is returning to the mentality of the Schneider days, or as he called them, the glory years. “It was a really good time for a comedy.”

Schneider admitted that many of his old SNL castmates aren’t exactly nuts about his political views. But that too is changing. “Um, they’re coming around,” he said after some thought. “You know, they don’t agree with all of it, but I would say that, um, they’re agreeing more to what they’re seeing.”

Carlson was dubious. Did Schneider actually believe that “the people in the world you’ve spent your life in” — the comedy world — would agree with his political views? “I think so,” Schneider responded cautiously. “If you get them one-on-one. Not on Twitter, not on Facebook.” 

Surely they’d all agree that comedy needs to question authority, Schneider added. “Saturday Night Live, at its best truthfully, was trying to make our friends laugh and question authority, make fun of authority no matter who’s in charge.”

Back in Schneider’s day, that meant taking down family members of powerful people. “I remember we were making fun of Bill Clinton. We had Julia Sweeney play the daughter, what’s her name? Chelsea. And people were like, ‘You can’t go after somebody’s kid! How dare you!’”

Schneider didn’t understand the big deal. “Well, it’s a kid. We’re not — she just put braces on,” he reasoned. “There seems to be an outrage with liberals. They don’t have as good a sense of humor.”

Schneider stopped himself, tapping into his newfound understanding, tolerance, forgiveness and empathy. “Well, I should say this: They’re more sensitive."

He then took a beat. “And they get outraged.”

Get that 50th-anniversary party invitation ready, Lorne — the kinder, gentler Rob Schneider is ready to come home.