“I’ll put a bullet in your head”: The ’90s ‘Saturday Night Live’ star who wanted to murder Rob Schneider
Is there a more depressingly predictable reaction from an ageing comic who says some horrible stuff, then gets pulled up on it, only to blame it all on cancel culture and the fact you ‘can’t make jokes anymore’? If there is, then nobody has told Rob Schneider.
He is one of the seemingly many old, wealthy white Americans in the entertainment industry convinced that there are all kinds of conspiracy theories going on against them, even having to end a stand-up gig for a hospital charity early because people walked out when he started banging on about vaccines and gender identity.
Schneider trotted out the same tired old rhetoric about free speech (but not the consequences of what you say) after that, and it’s possibly not a surprise that it happened in the first place, because other than an enduring friendship with Adam Sandler that basically amounts to a lot of cameo appearances, he appears to have made something of a habit of upsetting people for about 30 years.
It goes back as far as his days as a young performer on Saturday Night Live, where his paths crossed not just with Sandler, but with other greats like The Simpsons’ star Phil Hartman and David Spade. According to the latter, Schneider went out of his way to do things that would antagonise other cast members, to the point that Hartman actually once threatened him with death.
Some years back, Spade was a guest on the Howard Stern Show and recalled his time in the early 1990s on SNL, especially an incident where Hartman had hired a young intern to gain experience on the New York show, only for Schneider’s girlfriend to get jealous of her and demand that he fire her, which he promptly did, but without telling Hartman. That apparently got Hartman so angry that he threw Schneider up against a wall and told him, “I’ll put a bullet in your head”.
Spade didn’t escape Schneider’s antics either, though, constantly trying to undermine him by leaving his name off sketches they had co-written and handily forgetting to tell Spade about important meetings he was supposed to be at. Spade recalled, “We both weren’t really being ourselves. We were both trying to keep our jobs, trying to be famous. It was just sort of gross”.
Despite that, he said the pair had patched things up over the years and were now friends. After leaving SNL, Schneider had a period of doing stand-up and making occasional appearances in movies, but it was thanks to a leg-up from Sandler that he had his brief period of popularity, going from a supporting role in Big Daddy and The Waterboy to the lead in his own movie, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.
The story of a fish tank cleaner who becomes a male prostitute, it was a big hit and led to him fronting another comedy, The Hot Chick, three years later. A sequel to Deuce Bigalow was panned by critics in 2005, and it seemed the days of Schneider having the pull to be the main character in a movie were done.
Since then, he’s basically made a living appearing in every Adam Sandler film, even those terrible Netflix ones, and complaining about how unfair the world is despite being incredibly rich and just hanging around with rich mates in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, he’s now going to be in Grown Ups 3 with Sandler, plus he’ll do a voice in the animation Leo 2, written by Sandler.
