Controversial comedian Rob Schneider performs onstage during the ‘Comedy in Your Car’s’ drive-In concert at Ventura County Fairgrounds and Event Center on August 28, 2020 in Ventura, California.(Getty)
When the Hospitals of Regina Foundation invited former Saturday Night Live star Rob Schneider to perform at their Four Seasons Ball fundraiser, they probably weren’t expecting to have to issue an apology.
However, that’s exactly what the Canadian charity ended up having to do, after the increasingly right-wing and controversial comedian reportedly offended the majority of the audience at the event by telling anti-trans and anti-vaccination jokes.
The Four Seasons Ball took place in Saskatchewan, Canada on Saturday (1 June), with Schneider’s allegedly misogynistic, transphobic and Covid-denying jokes going down like a lead balloon with the audience, with some attendees claiming the comedian was “booed off-stage”.
At the very least, it seems his performance was cut short. In their apology statement, the Hospitals of Regina Foundation wrote:
“While we recognise that in a free and democratic society individuals are entitled to their views and opinions and that comedy is intended to be edgy, the content, positions and opinions expressed during Mr. Schneider’s set do not align with the values of our Foundation and team.
“We do not condone, accept, endorse or share (his) positions, as expressed during his comedy set and acknowledge that in this instance the performance did not meet the expectations of our audience and our team.
“A decision was, therefore, made to ask Mr. Schneider to end his performance earlier than intended, to which he agreed and immediately left the stage. An unconditional apology was offered right after to our guests and our community. We reiterate this sincere and unconditional apology today, for any offence caused.”
Rob Schneider has “shifted to the right” in recent years, with Rolling Stone charting the “radicalisation” of the comedian. He started making anti-vaccination statements in 2012; shortly afterwards he endorsed then-Republican candidate Tim Donnelly, an ex-member of the anti-immigrant Minutemen border patrol group
What did Rob Schneider say about trans people?
Although the Rob Schneider Regina video isn’t available online, several people who were there gave detailed accounts of what was said: much of which seems to have taken the form of transphobic dog-whistles.
One Reddit user quoted by Entertainment Weekly claimed to have been in attendance, saying: “he opened up with some pretty funny jokes about how Trump is a convicted felon and so America is a s**t show compared to us. Those got laughs, obviously.
“But then he jumped into how Trudeau made everyone get numerous vaccines and called it a ‘scam-demic’ with no real punchline, which was enough for the crowd (including me) to start realizing that this guy was a moron and his set would be a trainwreck.
“He then moved to transphobia saying that ‘back in my day we liked our women without penises’ and told an anecdote about how he told his son, who is ‘bad at sports’ to say he is a girl to get a better chance…. then he discussed how the New York Times is nuts for using the term ‘menstruating people.’ Typical transphobic dumbassery and most of it was an attempt at indoctrination rather than comedy.”
The user went on to say that organisers “cut him off early after that.”
Another attendee, Tynan Allan, confirmed to CBC that the comedy set contained transphobic, misogynistic, and anti-vaccination jokes, saying: “Everyone in the room was groaning, saying, ‘What is going on?’ Like whispering to themselves. Not a single laugh at times. It was just very apparent how uncomfortable everyone felt and how unacceptable the things he was talking about were.”
Over on X (formerly Twitter), others weighed in, with several saying they wished there was a video available of Rob Schneider being “yanked off stage” at the Hospitals of Regina event.
Another added: “Who invites noted antivaxxer Rob Schneider to do a… *checks notes* hospital fundraiser!”
In 2023, Schneider’s stand-up special, Rob Schneider: Woke Up in America, aired on Fox Nation – and was widely panned. The special featured jokes about Biden, his pronouns (“hee” and “haw”), and misogynistic comments about “gender ideology”, for example: “Everybody knows what a woman is. A woman is someone who gets mad at you for something you did three f**king years ago.”