When Rob Schneider calls you from the car, you can’t help but wonder where he’s going.
The set of Happy Gilmore 2? A Los Angeles comedy club? One of the few bars on the West Coast where they still let David Spade drink for free?
I never did learn where Schneider was headed during our conversation — we had bigger things to talk about. Things like the First Amendment, Saturday Night Live, the Khmer Rouge, vaccine mandates, Alexis de Tocqueveille, and Shane Gillis.
If you think that’s a random smattering of topics, you may not be ready for Schneider’s new book. “You Can Do It!: Speak Your Mind, America,” is equal parts memoir, historical survey, and political polemic, all wrapped up in Schneider’s trademark irreverent humor. At times it feels like Schneider is trying to make the case for free speech through sheer force of will: his stream-of-consciousness narrative plows forward at a breakneck pace, flitting from childhood reminiscence to an exploration of Soviet propaganda and back to a funny Chris Farley anecdote all before you can say “makin’ copies!”
That the book is funny isn’t surprising. After nearly a decade on Saturday Night Live, Schneider moved to the big screen, starring in hit films like “The Hot Chick” and “The Benchwarmers,” and making countless memorable appearances alongside his close friend and former SNL cast mate, Adam Sandler.
The humor is a given. It’s everything else that’s shocking.
Schneider is hardly the first celebrity to get political, nor the first to get in trouble for doing so. That he moved from left to right is a bit more shocking, but not without precedent. What’s truly strange about Schneider is just how seriously he’s taking his political turn. “You Can Do It!” doesn’t just have arguments — it has information. It has citations and statistics and digressions on Stanley Milgram and Mikhail Bulgakov. At times it feels more like a college lecture hall than a 30 Rock soundstage.
What made Deuce Bigelow get so serious?
“I got into show business to avoid having to do stuff like writing a book,” Schneider told The Daily Wire, adding that doing so was “a pain in the ass.” It was after witnessing the “egregious attack on our civil liberties and the attack on free speech” perpetrated by Democrats and their media allies that Schneider decided to pick up the pen. But even then, he didn’t lose his sense of humor.
“We’re kind of f***ed as a country,” Schneider said. “And so I do feel a responsibility, even though it cost me money and cost me work, I feel like it is my comedic-patriotic duty to at least bring these things to attention.”
The importance of protecting free speech may be the stated focus of “You Can Do It!” But Schneider’s understanding of this “comedic-patriotic duty” is perhaps the most essential — and certainly the most interesting — thread of the book.
“As de facto intellectuals, comedians are the cultural rearview mirrors,” Schneider writes. “Our jokes reflect the essence of a particular time, place, and attitude, to remind us of the context of where we just came from.”
This is why it felt so wrong when, following Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and then the coronavirus pandemic 2020, comedians by and large abandoned their craft and began echoing liberal talking points.
“I think the low watermark of comedy in the 21st century was late night television, with these hosts who all had interchangeable monologues,” Schneider told The Daily Wire.
“Nothing to me was more egregious than the dancing syringes on Colbert’s show. That to me, it wasn’t cringe. It was Soviet bloc. It seems like something out of the Khmer Rouge.”
Schneider says the preservation of free speech in America depends in a large part on the flourishing of comedy — honest, equal-opportunity, no-holds-barred comedy.
“If you can get people to see the absurdity” of a given figure or issue, Schneider told The Daily Wire, “and mock it and laugh at it, it is the best way to move its natural path towards tyranny so that it collapses.
“When the public is comfortable laughing at the government, then they are no longer in fear of the government,” he said.
This is what makes Schneider’s activism so refreshing. Unlike many celebrities who jump in the arena, he doesn’t think his fame entitles him to serve as a moral arbiter for the rest of us. Rather, he sees himself as a member of the comedian class, a role that comes with a certain obligation to challenge authority and speak truth to power.
“I’m not saying I’m 100% right in these things,” he says, “but the fact is we need to have discourse, we need to not shout each other down.”
That humility doesn’t mean Schneider is pulling punches. He says that “the Democratic Party needs to lose this election — and maybe two or three more — so that they can regroup and become a political party that isn’t undemocratic and authoritarian.” Republicans, he tells The Daily Wire, “are going to have to put on their big boy pants and change legislation” should they win in November.
If this doesn’t happen — if Democrats keep power and continue their assault on free speech, or if Republicans win but resort to ad hominem attacks — Schneider worries about what will come next.
“Western civilization is committing suicide,” Schneider tells The Daily Wire, adding that “the United States is the last bastion of freedom in the world.”
“If we go, so goes the world,” he says. “There will be no Marines to rescue the United States from another country, there will be no food drop. There is no Marshall Plan for the United States. We are it.”
Dire as that sounds, Schneider has hope for the future of the country. His spirits are buoyed by, among other things: Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor content (“I don’t think Zuckerberg’s a bad actor”); Saturday Night Live’s decision to have Shane Gillis host after firing him for politically incorrect jokes (“How great was Lorne Michaels to do that?”); and The Daily Wire’s own Matt Walsh (“The one, rightful heir to Sacha Baron Cohen. I think Matt Walsh is a genius. I really do”).
But more than anything, Schneider is optimistic because he believes in America.
“This imperfect union was founded under God with a belief that we have done something special,” he says. “It is a union deserving of our forgiveness and deserving of our thanks, deserving of our gratitude and deserving of every attempt we can [make] for its preservation.”
To do that, “we must call out injustice. But in that call…we should have a reconciliation.”
“We have to be generous, and if our fault is that we are too generous, that is the price that we must pay, that is what this great nation calls upon us now to do,” Schneider says.
Before we spoke, I was ready for Schneider to go deep on all sorts of subjects — I had read the book, after all — but I wasn’t expecting such a serious meditation on American democracy. Thoroughly impressed and hoping for a good kicker, I asked Schneider if he had any parting thoughts he wanted to share. He didn’t even hesitate.
“The book’s also pretty funny.”