Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rob Schneider: Woke Up In America’ On Fox Nation, Where The Comedian Throws Red Meat To The Base

In 2023, it’s already passé in comedy specials to traffic in bits about being “cancelled” or “woke” or wondering whether comedians can even joke about anything these days, which means it’s time for streaming platforms you wouldn’t go looking for comedy to start delivering comedy for your niche interests. Enter Fox Nation. The SVOD spin-off of Fox News got into the stand-up comedy special game earlier this year with Roseanne Barr’s Cancel This, and has followed that up with another holdover from the late 1980s, Rob Schneider. Is this comedy just for Boomers, or is it at more than OK for everyone?

ROB SCHNEIDER: WOKE UP IN AMERICA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We’re all used to seeing Schneider as Adam Sandler’s cinematic comic-relief sidekick for the past quarter-century, and in more recent years, Schneider had his own, albeit smaller Netflix deal, which included two seasons of his own semi-autobiographical sitcom Real Rob in which he and his third wife portrayed themselves, as well as the 2020 special, Asian Momma Mexican Kids.

That special dealt with his family and even featured a duet with his daughter from his first marriage, Elle King.

This time around, Fox Nation wanted us to buckle up for an “unfiltered comedy special” that “will feature Schneider’s signature comedic take on a variety of topics, including culture wars, living in a woke world, and navigating the nuanced times of identity politics.”

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: At 59, Schneider barely qualifies among the youngest of the Baby Boomers, but his comedy definitely feels like much of what we’re seeing and hearing from Boomers these days, and fits in with comedy fans who subscribed to Fox Nation four months ago to see what Roseanne had to say.

Memorable Jokes: The first 20 minutes are packed with his most politically-pointed barbs, choosing a voice to impersonate liberals that sounds not unlike fellow anti-vaxxer Jim Breuer, or even Carlos Mencia’s old shtick for mocking the intellectually disabled. He gets applause breaks and boos for questioning Democrats or liberals who have chosen either not to define womanhood or picked different terminology for women. He takes on the United Airlines CEO for saying he wanted to hire more diverse pilots, using it as an excuse to act out an impersonation of unqualified Puerto Rican little person with no sense of direction in the cockpit (which he also corrects himself to say “pussypit”) (even if the reality is that United vowed to recruit more diverse candidates for pilot training).

He’s got a chunk of pandemic mask jokes, complete with a mask as a prop.

Later, though, Schneider proclaims he still has “traditional liberal” bona fides, earning light applause for sticking up for gay rights as civil rights, even if his support for gay marriage is dependent upon a joke that they have the right “to be just as miserable as me.”

He also has a few woefully misguided and explicitly anti-trans jokes. And does he have a joke about his own pronouns? Of course he does! “My pronouns are hee and haw.”

While Schneider claims liberal and conservative are merely labels meant to divide Americans, he also proudly recalls how he voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and after a few stories about his interactions with Trump in the years before that, has a no-segue hard pivot to a joke suggesting President Joe Biden should be put out to pasture. Here’s a clip of that joke as he told it earlier on his tour.

Schneider’s actual stories about Trump are illuminating, though, as he reminds us they appeared onscreen together in Home Alone 2 (Schneider played a bellhop in the Plaza Hotel, owned by Trump), then again seven years later as guests in 1999 on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, then again nine years after that when Schneider unexpectedly wound up as a judge for the 2008 Miss USA pageant, then run by Trump.

And there are more stories about his family to share, from a lengthy one about his wife convincing him to get a vasectomy, to a crazy closing anecdote in which Schneider reveals that he took his young daughter to see Paul McCartney in concert and meet the music legend backstage afterward — despite her coming down with COVID right before they got on the plane to go! WHY IS HE BROADCASTING THIS TO THE WORLD? “I can’t be the guy who kills Paul McCartney,” he concedes at one point in the story. “I get enough bad press as it is.” Thank God he didn’t!

Our Take: If and when you think of Rob Schneider, it’s probably in relation to one of his many cinematic cameos (or one of his bigger supporting or leading roles on the big screen in the late 1990s and early 2000s), and all these years later, he’ll still lean on a “You can do it!!!” for a crowd-pleasing closer. When a fan yells it at him 20 minutes into this special, Schneider even pauses to take it in, recalling it has been a 25-year-run since he first uttered those words in The Waterboy. Perhaps feeling extra nostalgic, Schneider also runs through a medley of his most quotable movie lines to remind him and us of his stature in our popular culture.

But he’s never really staked his claim as a stand-up, even though that’s where he first broke through on an HBO Young Comedians Special before getting SNL.

Schneider’s 2020 Netflix special was so slight, it only clocked in at 44 minutes with that daddy-daughter duet plus another 20-minute section bolstered by piano accompaniment. So it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if Netflix passed on a follow-up, and I had very low expectations coming in for this. So when he opens by telling his Tampa audience how nice Floridians are, and feeling for them because “you have people every day, just running over your border,” it felt like this might be the longest 78 minutes in my future. Running over the Florida border, you say? The mostly waterfront border? Running? But he saves it with a misdirect that gets howling approval, saying the foreign invaders are from, checks notes, “California and New York.”

And yet, while some of his material panders too much politically, and much of it won’t qualify as groundbreaking in terms of premises or punchlines, it’s not all half-bad. If he had taken out the most rabid right-wing red meat, he coulda had a decent hour. But then it might not have gotten him on Fox Nation.

Our Call: If you don’t already have Fox Nation, SKIP IT and save your free trial for some other time. But if you do have Fox Nation, and you’re a middle-aged or senior guy, then this might just be the material you were looking for today.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.