Rob Schneider Is Seemingly at War with Canada
After the audience of a hospital benefit show in the decidedly conservative Canadian province of Saskatchewan booed Rob Schneider off-stage and out of the country earlier this summer, Deuce Bigalow now believes that he is the victim of a dictatorial effort to end free speech in the Great White North — as if he’s not getting kicked out of shows for conservative Americans, too.
The last year has been one of the stranger stretches of Schneider’s already absurd career. Back in December 2023, Schneider’s stand-up “comedy” performance at a holiday gala for prominent Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. was “so off-color and off-putting” that it caused some GOP leaders to walk out of the show in disgust. The event’s organizers, a right-leaning political nonprofit called the Senate Working Group, reportedly cut Schneider’s set short and asked the comedian to leave before sending out an apologetic email to their attendees, explaining, “While we do our best to ensure every aspect of our program is professional, courteous and appropriate, we sincerely regret that the entertainment at last night’s program fell short of that goal.”
Then, this past June, Schneider astoundingly booked another benefit gig for the Hospitals of Regina Foundation in the conservative stronghold of Saskatchewan, Canada, where Google apparently returns no results for “Rob Schneider charity show.” When these nonprofit organizers also had to end Schneider’s crude and upsetting set early amidst a chorus of boos, Schneider should have inferred from the emerging pattern that, perhaps, his act isn’t fit for an audience that’s any more refined than the average Wednesday night crowd at Hooters, even if they might be as “anti-woke” as he is.
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Instead of choosing introspection, Schneider is now on a campaign of projection, and his target is Canada — like, the entire country. Within the past week, Schneider has twice attacked Canadians and their government for apparently oppressing free speech, first during his interview with Tucker Carlson and then again in a recent talk with The Hollywood Reporter, in which Schneider claimed that the country is “under a repressive regime where they call protesters terrorists.”
Anyone wanna guess what Schneider called those Zoomer climate activists who spilled soup on the protective glass covering a painting in a tweet from literally three weeks ago?
“I’m very proud that I didn’t bow to that dictatorship that (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau is doing, and I’m happy to be one of those people that pissed them off,” Schneider said of his disastrous set for the Hospitals of Regina Foundation. PM and Liberal Party leader Trudeau has no affiliation with the nonprofit serving the City of Regina, and the Saskatchewan general elections have resulted in a conservative victory in every election dating back to 2011. “And I’ll do it again if I get the chance, but I don’t think they’ll let me in anytime soon,” Schneider added, proudly proclaiming the fact that an entire country now finds him unbookable as well as unfunny.
However, Schneider’s acrimony is’'t directed at all Canadians. During Schneider’s talk with Carlson last week, he praised the participants of the Canada convoy protests of 2022, in which cross-border truckers pushed back against COVID-19 vaccine mandates that required them to get the shot before entering the U.S. by disrupting supply lines and blockading provincial capitals for one month. “Justin Trudeau is the dictator of the north,” Schneider said of Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act for nine days in order to end the blockade and protect public infrastructure. “He will have no problem trouncing on the rights of Canadians who are protesting. … What helped open and end COVID (restrictions) was those truckers who risked everything there.”
Schneider claims that his criticisms of Trudeau played a factor in his “cancellation” at the hospital fundraiser earlier this summer, telling Carlson, “They really went after me.” However, Schneider did acknowledge that his openly transphobic material may have played a part in him getting the hook 10 minutes into his performance, though he claims that the audience loved his tired, predictable jokes about transgender athletes. “It gets big laughs,” Schneider said of his trans routine. “They were really laughing, and then they got kinda quiet, ‘cause they’re too polite. Canadians are too polite. They don’t wanna hurt anybody’s feelings, which ends up hurting everybody’s feelings because then you end up having some guy who loves China running your country.”
Schneider’s account of the Saskatchewan set contradicts what the local newspaper Regina Leader-Post reported of the fundraiser show, as their eye-witnesses claimed that the audience “roundly booed” the conservative comedian during the cut-short performance. But Schneider’s side of the story does highlight the absurdity of the current ax he’s grinding. The guy who is too much of an unfunny, untalented asshole to perform in front of American Republicans or a crowd in Canada’s most conservative province is, apparently, hell-bent on beefing with an entire country of people who are internationally known for being too kind to antagonize.
I guess it’s still better than getting into a public pissing match with your own daughter.
