Rob Schneider Lectures Us On The Importance Of Empathy In Comedy

By Kristy Puchko | Celebrity | April 30, 2018 |

By Kristy Puchko | Celebrity | April 30, 2018 |

Former Saturday Night Live alum, Rob Schneider thinks the late-night sketch show has lost its way. Specifically, he’s told New York Daily News that the show that invited Donald Trump on during his campaign is now too firmly against the President. Specifically, the conservative comedian takes issue with Alec Baldwin’s recurring appearances as Trump.

Schneider, who played such memorable SNL characters as that guy who really liked making photocopies, declared Baldwin’s impression is “hard to watch,” adding that because you know Baldwin is a liberal who hates Trump in real life, “There’s no possible surprise.”

Comparing Baldwin’s spin on the President to Dana Carvey’s George Bush impression, Schneider said, “Carvey played it respectfully. To me, the genius of Dana Carvey was Dana always had empathy for the people he played, and Alec Baldwin has nothing but a fuming, seething anger toward the person he plays.”

Empathy. The problem is that Baldwin has no empathy for a president who has insulted Mexicans from the first day of his campaign, publicly mocked a reporter for his disability, insulted women almost as often as he’s ditched the Oval Office to go golfing, and refused to denounce white supremacists following a rally where an innocent woman named Heather Heyer was killed. Ok.

This might mean more—or anything—coming from a comedian who didn’t build his movie career on mocking minorities and headlining comedies that centered on racist and sexist stereotypes. For instance, how about that time he wore yellowface to play a buck-toothed Asian stereotype in I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, a comedy about two men getting married that Decider’s Brett White declared, “freely drops the ‘F’ slur with the restraint of an angry middle schooler.”

Schneider has shown this “empathy” toward many races while appearing in Adam Sandler movies. ScreenCrush’s E. Oliver Whitney offered a helpful rundown when the man of many whitewashings decided to lecture Representative John Lewis, Civil Rights leader and friend of the late Martin Luther King Jr., on Martin Luther King Jr. on Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Here’s a screengrab of the now deleted tweet’s content, courtesy of USA Today.

And let us never forget the empathy Schneider displayed to women when he took on the titular role in the body-swap comedy The Hot Chick.

Clearly, Schneider is both a master of comedy and a master of empathy. So we should take his opinions on these matters very seriously.