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.”