‘Rob Schneider: Asian Momma, Mexican Kids' fails to impress with cringe-inducing accent mimicry, boomer humor
Spoilers for ‘Rob Schneider: Asian Momma, Mexican Kids’
At some point around the fifteen-minute mark, Rob Schneider announces during his set, “That’s not racist. That’s accurate!” What’s not racist but accurate? His impression of a Chinese waitstaff at a Chinese restaurant, where he’s saying, “Beef with oyster sauce.” He proceeds to explain that for Chinese immigrants in the US, speaking English is as difficult as for any person in the US speaking Chinese. He does a demonstration of the aforementioned Chinese waitstaff beating the words, “Beef with oyster sauce,” out of his throat.
The actor’s first Netflix stand-up special, ‘Rob Schneider: Asian Momma, Mexican Kids’, by this point has already set the tone -- or rather, the accents -- for what to expect. He mimics his wife Patricia Azarcoya Arce’s Mexican accent that sounds suspiciously like Speedy Gonzales or Frito Bandito, the decidedly racist cartoon mascot for Fritos corn chips. He also mimics his Filipino mother’s accent. He mimics Koreans. He mimics… you get the drift. And he does each and everyone badly.
But it’s not the racist accents that annoy most in Schneider’s stand-up set. It’s that the audience at the theater where it was shot somehow treats every nugget of quote-unquote humor that comes out of his mouth as a cue for a '90s sitcom-style laughter track. Whereas, really, hardly anything in the set is funny. Schneider seems barely interested in his own set enough for anyone else to find it interesting. In fact, I got so bored while watching, I briefly took a break and watched “The Best of Ali Wong” on YouTube. I viewed curated clips from her old special, ‘Baby Cobra’, and pulled a muscle laughing at her thinly-veiled digs at Louis CK.
Digs that incidentally also apply to ‘Asian Momma, Mexican Kids’. In ‘Baby Cobra’, a very pregnant Wong addresses parenthood for comics and says that women comics don’t get pregnant. And if they do, they generally disappear, noting that it was definitely not the same deal male comics had. Once male comics have kids, she says, “They’ll generally get up on stage a week afterward and they’ll be like, ‘Guys, I just had this f**kin’ baby. That baby’s a little piece of s**t. It’s so annoying and boring,’ and all these other s***ty dads in the audience are like, ‘THAT’S HILARIOUS. I IDENTIFY.’”
Schneider, in his set, demonstrates this exact behavior. He tells tales of potty-training, and his daughter wanting to sleep in his bed, and more. And none of it is particularly funny or insightful. It’s not unfunny or terrible. But it’s hard to imagine why anyone -- least of all a really famous actor and comic -- thought, “This right here is what should be on my first Netflix special!”
But if the milquetoast comedy was not bad enough, at some point, Schneider starts talking about the reckoning of men in a post-Me Too era. And instead of actually addressing the problems, he chooses to employ ironic lampshading -- making him look self-aware as he discusses what he calls men’s “pig potential,” or their ability to act like a pig. Culture critic Jonathan McIntosh once noted in one of his video essays, “The problem with this comedic device is that, by itself, it doesn’t critique or challenge sexism, homophobia, or racism. It simply acknowledges it in a humorous way. Acknowledging bigotry is not the same as critiquing bigotry, especially when the punchlines end up making light of serious social issues like sexual harassment.”
It also doesn’t help that Schneider throws in ‘Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus’-like pop-wisdom in the mix. He talks about relationships and what men want and what women want, all neatly packaged into convenient heteronormative stereotypes.
Perhaps the only good part of the whole show -- and it was just a smidge under 45 minutes -- was that at the end of it, Schneider and his daughter Elle King performed a duet. King’s singing and songwriting are globally famous. But Schneider was above average; which makes one wonder if this whole show could have been a father-daughter duet with some (not much) comedy thrown in here and there. It would have been more wholesome. And it would have made me cringe less.
‘Rob Schneider: Asian Momma, Mexican Kids’ is available for viewing only on Netflix.