Interview: Rarely Asked Questions – Rob Schneider: Page 2 of 2

  • What do your children think of your job?

 

       My five year old thinks that every family has their own TV show. Instead of asking her classmates if they can have a play date, she asks them if she can be on their TV show. 

 

  • What’s the worst thing about being a comedian?

 

       Comedians, or at least the good ones, have to be constantly writing new shit. It’s not like being a musician where if you snort some incredible bath salts and after you attempt to eat somebody’s face you write a truly great song and can tour the rest of your life in dingy bars for drunks just waiting to hear that one song.

 

  •  I think you are very good at what you do (that’s why I’m asking these questions). What do you think of you?

 

       I’m the luckiest bastard in the world. Not because I get to do what I truly love, make (some) people laugh. But because the Universe smiled down at me one day, laughed and said let’s see what happens when this self-absorbed, narcissistic asshole meets a lovely little lady who will show him what this whole experiment of consciousness is really about?

 

  • How important is luck in terms of career success – have you had lucky breaks?

 

       Thousands upon thousands of people, artists, sculptures, musicians, lovers, bank robbers, dummies and people like me who is a little of all those things get lucky breaks. It is the very few individuals who recognize the break they are being given and decide to MOVE on it and see where it takes them. Most people don’t recognize it and end up in an office wondering what the hell just happened?!

 

  • Alan Davies has said that comedians fall into two categories - golfers and self-harmers. The former just get on with life, the latter are tortured artists. Which are you – or do you think you fit into a third category?

 

       I never allow myself to be completely honest about the psychic price (and damage) one has to pay to peel back the subterfuge and layers of denial and lies that makes it possible to risk and suffer abject humiliation at the hands of complete strangers in a (when I started) smoke-filled room. However, it’s through the fire that the potter makes the pottery.  

 

  • Who is your favourite person ever and why? – not including family or friends or other comedians.

 

       My fave comedians are all fucked up people who would have never survived the #MeToo movement; Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Louis C.K., Peter Cook. 

       

       My fave person outside my wife, the incredible Patricia Maya, is Alan Watts. He lived in Northern California when I was a small boy and introduced me to Zen Buddhism. He was and is my guru and taught me a way to see the world not as an accident, not as a debt, but as an unfolding drama. And most importantly… to enjoy it!!

     

  • Do you keep your drawers tidy and if not, why not? (please think long and hard about this question, it's to settle an argument with my girlfriend. The future of our relationship could depend on your response).

 

       I don’t keep my drawers tidy. It’s the only place in the house that I actually have control over. It’s my way of telling the world to fuck off and that I’m secretly crazy.

 

 

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