The Worst Idea Of All Time - Overlooked and Undercooked S3 - 1: Pig Potential

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Welcome to Overlooked and Undercooked: Season 3. In lockdown, Guy and Tim decided to watch Rob Schinder’s Netflix special Asian Momma, Mexican Kids marking the first time that the fellaz have put a comedy special through the ole Worst Idea treatment. Monty finds some relatability with Rob’s ‘Dick in sweatpants’ joke but has no love for his ‘Mother-In-Law Molestation’ bit. Tim is shocked at the appearance of both a classical pianist and a blood relative enlisted to fatten out the sub-50 minute show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🎵 I have never been more angry in my life at Guy Montgomery than I am right now. What? Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Overlooked and Undercooked, a critical review of the many projects and lives of Rob Schneider. I'm Tim Batt, and this is guy hey guy hiya tim um tim and i have just watched on a brisk sort of winter's uh wednesday morning rob schneider's first since his breakout hbo half hour i believe actually his first comedy special asian mama mexican kids on netflix it was released pretty recently it's a brisk 44 minutes and um this is the first of seven reviews that we will be undertaking together as we explore

uh rob's offering. I don't think we've ever done this to the, we've never done stand-up comedy inside of the sort of worst idea franchise. No, we've never given a comedian special the old worst idea treatment until now. What an absolutely fucked one to do it to. Well, first of all, What an absolutely fucked one to do it to. Well, first of all, a stand-up special, unlike a movie, is, I think, probably a piece of media that would stand up, generally speaking, to multiple watchers. considered special which most of them are like if a comedian is getting to the stage of committing

that material to a fully fledged production that's going to be streaming online um you're sort of retiring generally speaking a bunch of jokes out of your live stand-up circuit so there's material you've been working on for anywhere between like usually two and five years um not in this fucking case no way man i'm pretty convinced rob schneider just thought of a lot of these things on the fly on stage yeah uh i would i would be i feel like what you're suggesting through that sentence tim is that this is not a good comedy special and i am willing to agree with you on that this is one of the most pedestrian sort of time warp style uh things i've watched and we've been watching porn from the 70s recently and this felt more outdated and offensive than that yeah it's um i just like i often think about

it's a weird thing watching a comedy special because it does there is more pressure on the performance than if you're to watch it live in the room just by virtue of the fact you've chosen to record this and distribute it to more than just the people who wanted to watch it on the night and so i've always felt as a comedian i'm a harsher judge of specials than i would like to be and then i am of material in the room because it's like i feel like i'm setting a higher bar to clear and the the feeling i got when i was watching this was like i i was sort of paying attention because you know in the interest of the podcast and the conversation it was important to to note what was happening but the idea of watching this in the room say the classic which is sort of auckland or new zealand's uh predominant comedy club like i could literally place myself on the

balcony inside of my body watching any comedian any comedian in the country or any comedian i've seen in the entirety of my life opening up any of these premises and literally pulling out my phone to go on any of the apps i have instead of engaging with and listening to what is being said like there wasn't a single thing an idea that rob schneider introduced that was of any interest relevance okay well we did a fun we did a fun thing which unfortunately didn't um pan out for me because my laptop crashed halfway through but we were writing um a set list of what it would look like for a comedian to have on stage with them just a little notebook page with one word prompts for the jokes that you're going to cover in that special art but guy you've you've

your one uh yeah mine survive till the end right yeah so he opens he opens with the same joke that they open the trailer with that i as i watched the trailer with tim said sort of aghast out loud how can that be the joke you lead your trailer with it's not just how he leads the trailer it's how he leads the entire special which is a joke about how in a set list it just says sex versus cookies and uh the basic premise is i'm of an age now where i like cookies more than i like sex and then he sort of opens and explores this premise by uh imagining that his wife or some unnamed woman has cookies underneath her breasts and he's much more interested in moving the breasts out of the

way to enjoy the cookie and that sort of is like bang here i am i actually know that's not fair first thing he says when he walks out on stage is you can do it i missed that completely i didn't hear that i also want i want to tell you tim that this special was recorded in 2020 mere in salt lake city mere moments before the world went into crisis and lockdown like this was recorded at a time when the knowledge that covid19 is a highly infectious and dangerous disease was out there but like before there was any actual sort of federal or collective enforced action and rob schneider for whatever reason looked at the chicken scratch that he'd put down on a bit of paper and said i've sold or given away x number of tickets to this taping i am not calling this

off do you know what would have been incredible if he just had to descend it into a bit of freestyling on his thoughts on covid on stage dude like yeah it's it's at least that would be something yeah it's very grim but that would genuinely be interesting it would be wrong and it would probably be damaging but i don't even know that it would be damaging because i was thinking about this i was watching this and chelsea was in the kitchen making a coffee and I was watching it very rudely and selfishly just on my laptop with like the audio open to sort of infect anyone else's ear canal. Normally it's selfish to do the opposite, to keep the comedy to yourself through headphones. But in the case of Rob Schneider's special, it is a meaner thing to let the audio leak out. And she was just like aghast at what he was saying.

She's like, how is this like, why has no one said anything about this? And I was like, because no one cares. No one knows it's happened. Like, I don't know who asked for this. I don't know if this followed the sort of traditional Netflix model of them paying for a special or the Rob Schneider Netflix model of him creating something and paying them to release it. He leaves a tiny external hard drive with play this on a post-it note and a big bag of money outside an executive producer who he stalked and found the home address of. and found the home address of and this motherfucker is sneaking them onto the platform without telling anyone because it's getting his kids through college rob schneider is paying for this guy to send his child to stanford oh it's crazy so he opens up with his sexiest cookies

then he goes into his fucked up on cheese material which is like a um his fucked up on cheese material is centered around the premise that young people love to get fucked up rob schneider is in his 50s now if he wanted to get fucked up he'd eat cheese that's the whole joke that's all of it it's there yeah and then he does a great bit about He's got a personal trainer And how gross he finds ripped old people At least that's relatable What? You know The stretched skin thing

I see where he's coming from there One point to Rob, actually Fuck you, guy One point to Rob Look, there was one I think I hopefully annotated it There was one joke which I was like, you know what? That's like actually a fairly, like a universal observation I've not heard said aloud before.

Was it when he was doing the Chinese restaurant owner accent? Or was it when he was doing his Mexican wife accent? Or was it when he was doing his Filipino mother accent? Was it one of those? No, Tim, it was the great Korean barbecue bit where he did his Korean accent. I'll get to what it was. But anyway, so he does his personal trainer bit and then he starts talking about his wife,

which sort of represents the beginning of the end. Those three jokes, at least, they were sort of independent joke jokes. They represented the idea that he wasn't going to... I sort of look at those three as like, here are three jokes or my efforts at jokes or here are three sentences. And then it was just this long garbled chunk of him admonishing himself and his family for enabling him to have a wife and have children just paragraph upon paragraph just reams of like incoherent diatribe sorry to pull you out of this but like do you just have the set list can you just read me the words that you've written down

yeah i mean that i i didn't just do single words, but I go sex versus cookies, fucked up on cheese, personal trainer, wife Mexican, question mark, dick in sweatpants. And that is a great bit. Embarrassingly, that's the one that I had earmarked. It's like he talks about how it's dangerous wearing sweatpants because he'll take his penis out too early when he's doing things like going to the bathroom and i have like when i've really had to go to the bathroom and been in a house and sort of forgotten myself like taking my penis out before i'm in the toilet and then notice it and be like this is absurd this is grotesque and so to hear him distill like an observation that i'd sort of amused myself with before i'm putting myself on a pedestal above

rob schneider controversially uh i sort of signed up for that and then he took away all the good work he'd done by almost stumbling into an original premise by doing the classic pullback and reveal of being like but this i'm in an olive garden it's a sort of like you sir, this is a Wendy's or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, three-year-old, toilet training, seven-year-old nightmares, allergies, third marriage, and then I've got in all caps, my big mother-in-law molestation bit. Yeah, right. Which I sort of- He sexually assaults his mother-in-law which is funny because he thought he was sexually assaulting his wife so you see there's the twist and then the other twist is that his wife is like okay with both of those outcomes because his mother-in-law hates him

so much she'd rather just let the moment of rob grabbing her in bed pass then talk to him this special is laced with moments of like borderline self-awareness where rob articulates just how unliked he is in his immediate community yeah and it's not only that but i think he does recognize the why as well the problem this is where rob schneider falls down he knows that he's a bad guy and he knows that people hate him and i think he kind of understands loosely why that's the case but he has a belief that everyone is as shitty as he is as a human and he has all of these routines in the special well not that many it's a fucking short special the closer of which is about a five minute song that he does with his daughter who's a legitimate pop star which we will get to but he's got so many moments where he keeps oh like

there's one joke in particular where he's this is so it's so bleak it's so fucking bleak where he's talking about how his wife kind of wants to leave him because he's so shitty and he's like yeah yeah and you'll find someone else because you're gorgeous but then you'll hate them because everyone's like me and then you'll dump them and you move on to someone else because you're gorgeous you'll find someone else and then you'll fucking hate them because they'll be like rob schneider too because all men are like me and it's just like dude no rob schneider no absolutely like roll up a newspaper and just bash you on the nose and then it's not right you're sort of looking like you're imagining rob schneider is a naughty dog at this point um yes and the other sort of logic that was underpinning that joke and he sort of articulates it articulates it at the end is like

essentially it's also about how his wife is a crazy bitch for being unhappy with rob schneider yeah it's like there's just it's so it's really hard to articulate but yeah so there's these these three preamble jokes then there's the i've got a wife i've got children i hate all of them i hate myself and he does like a decent chunk he does it he sort of leads into that he does a molestation bit then he does a bit rob is asian so he sort of outlines that he's got a filipino mother and then he sort of starts railing very gently against the current Hollywood system or against diversity in the arts by saying he's not the right kind of Asian. And he probably could have actually made some interesting and funny material out of this. That's a promising premise that he leaves on the floor.

but like he's like a promising premise that he leaves on the floor well you can't you hammer it at home inside of uh running conversation or running chat while we're watching this special which is like he has such a simple like he is but this special really highlights just like how simple this guy is this is a really really like fundamentally simple guy who is in who has been at various points in his career in proximity to comedy greatness and like has managed to successfully he's an opportunist i guess he's parlayed that into a multi-million dollar career like a very successful career but this special really lays bare which i guess is what stand-up comedy can do is like you know the it can it can sing and it can be incredible but like in this instance it just really highlights how like how primitive he is i guess yeah it's incredibly revealing just about how little was going on in his head which you can

read a few different ways because to us i think it's infinitely frustrating to see someone and it's the laziness as well it's kind of like because having a complexity of thought or or like a complexity of world view is definitely not a necessary step for a good comedy special you could like well done you could just talk about shapes or something you know well it's yeah he could embrace his idiocy or it's it's interesting because if i think about it but no work's been done yeah yeah on the comedy if i think about it in comparison to say norm like my probably favorite stand-up is norm mcdonald and it's like his whole persona is he is an idiot like he presents himself as being so thick and the

work that underpins that is like he's probably the smartest person like in terms of like deconstructing and putting something together he's probably the most intelligent person in the room like every premise that he prefaces by saying i'm an idiot i don't know anything comes with about three months of like you know reading hard graft and like yeah yeah and so but rob schneider's just like i'm an idiot and that's worked for me and so i will not work on like presenting this in any interesting or creative or like investigative way i'm just an idiot and then worse still it's it's so often not even going i'm an an idiot. It's going, I've got a bitch wife. Let's make fun of her right now.

So, yeah. So he does, he rails against his wife. He says his mother is Asian. He does this big bit about his mum. It's your catchphrase. Everyone loves a catchphrase. The catchphrase is, see what happens. And I think he uses that in Real Rob for memory as well, right?

Isn't that a catchphrase on one of the years? I think so. And it Real Rob for memory as well, right? Isn't that a catchphrase on one of the years? I think so. And it almost works at one point. He displays a knowledge of mic technique or joke structure, where he does like, there's this thing in comedy called the rule of threes, which is like you do one, two, and then the third one is different or unusual. And that's like the funniest.

You set up your pattern and you twist. He does like five or six of them none of them are very funny but the last one involves his mom being far away so previously the four or five before that when like he he does something wrong he's an idiot as a child his mom goes see what happens the sixth or seventh one whatever it is she's far away and so instead of see what happens the delivery is see what happens so that's great so that rules he sort of introduces this uh the introduction of him being half filipino is essentially a qualifier for the sort of 15 to 20 minutes of horrifically rampant racism racist accent work that defines the middle chunk of this special which is just rob schneider like

drawing out jokes that were on the cutting room floor of like all manner of specials from the nineties and early two thousands, which are just like Chinese restaurants to open at Christmas. You ever notice a Korean barbecue. You have to cook your own food. Like the most boring entry-level observations, all punched and spiced up by the fact that here is a 53 year old man in 2020, unafraid to do the most unabashedly racist and like coverall asian

accent well in addition to like the accent work the content is insane he says at one point i think in a chinese accent um because he's talking about chinese restaurants being open on christmas uh fuck jesus and then goes on to um say how like chinese restaurants have a meal special for 9 11 and it's just like man i don't know rob i don't fucking know about any of this i yeah yeah i almost like within within the that horrible joke i almost, like, within that horrible joke, I almost respected, like... The balls? Well, yeah, because I'm like, he doesn't know he's being offensive

with the first part of it, but he's at least, like, trying out something by veering towards, like... Yeah, I know what you mean. What would be widely recognised as risque material. Yeah, yeah. There's at least some stakes to it whereas the other stuff is just like my wife's a fucking bitch and so yeah asian and so i suck he does all of this um

he literally just does a bunch of like you know five minutes of a chinese accent and then at the end of it he qualifies it again by saying that's not racist it's accurate and you think what reprieve finally no more of this and then he instead just dives straight into a bit about how a you never see homeless asian people in america and then that's another 10 minute chunk of rob schneider doing a chinese accent and then into his korean barbecue bit which is like it's it's crazy to me this part of it he says um he accuses the korean barbecue restaurant model of being lazy but he's like seems kind of lazy and i'm like the lack of self-awareness at any point in the special to have the sentence seems kind of lazy is just so like brazen and oblivious so look something we haven't talked about yet and i don't know

maybe we should save um juicing some of this stuff for the following six episodes at i think about the it might even be like the halfway mark of this very very short comedy special he introduces a man to come on stage and start playing classical piano which goes for the rest of the show just as an undercurrent to add some pathos to his jokes and this is where rob changes gears into um trying to approach the me too moment in a way at the start and then quickly disregarding it but then just for the rest of the set the rest of his show there's just a pianist playing on stage for him yeah so you don't really see the pianist when he comes out on the stage and um jack she will say this the very start did you see the very very start of it when he's like he says welcome

rob schneider and he's like yeah side of stage and looking at the camera yeah i kind of like that yeah it's difficult to find an interesting way for a comedian to get to the stage in specials these days and that was not necessarily interesting but it was like it was somewhat novel it was like it was and it was intimate it felt kind of cool to be there for that yeah just because that's normally what happens when like so shout out to doing shows shout out to rob schneider for that obviously you couldn't get anyone to tour with him but yeah you don't really not true not true he got a blood relative to close the show with him oh that's true but you don't you don't see the piano when he walks out the stage after that moment you don't really like notice that there's a piano or more importantly a pianist on the stage

he comes on he welcomes them on he does introduce them so he does like he does this 20 minutes of accent work and then he just turns to the piano and he goes would you mind playing me a little something and he as tim says sort of very gingerly launches into he says man it's been a you know there's a lot of men about men and he's sort of like fumbling around how to articulate it which is crazy to be even remotely sensitive or aware because it just turns out to be another framework for him to rail against his miserable wife this is um that's the men are all like potential pigs or something right i forget the exact yeah yeah potential pigs all men have pig potential and then that's pretty much him saying all men have pig potential is like the way he opens up the premise that men and women

are different all men want is sex all women want is relationships and bear in mind, this comes not 20 minutes after his big opener, which is, I like cookies more than sex. So then the special gracefully ends with him being joined on stage by his actual daughter, his adult daughter, who is, she was born in 89, it makes her what like 31 al king is her name daughter of um a british model and rob schneider who is a very legitimate grammy nominated pop star who just do a karaoke number at the end yeah and she is phenomenal and rob is shitty um it's like it's really nuts it's like that's the moment where you can sort of see he knew he didn't

quite have enough to get this over the line even with the big bag of cash next to the hard drive he was like there needs to be something more than just me how staggering is it to do a special like even how much do you think was cut out of the live show to go into this? Because if you take out the song, which, honestly, was probably about four minutes, right? And I think the runtime of the special was about 43 or something like that. So, like, he barely made it to 40 minutes of a comedy special. What confidence. I just,

I just, I'm going to film this. Yeah. It's crazy. I also just want to quickly say, because there is, after he opens up the men want sex, women want relationships.

And before he brings his daughter out, he did one of the most insane act outs I've seen, which is like, he's talking about, uh, it's not even a premise, but he, he lingers on it for about five minutes, which is like he's talking about uh it's not even a premise but he he lingers on it for about five minutes which is like um it's about levels of attraction in a marriage where he says uh if you're oh it's a long joke if a man is roughly as attractive as his wife he treats her

like this but if he's married to a victoria's secret model he treats her like this you honestly like as he's delivering the joke halfway through you can see the matrix that he's married to a Victoria's Secret model, he treats her like this. You honestly, like, as he's delivering the joke halfway through, you can see the matrix that he's written on a notebook page where it goes, it goes like attractive man, attractive woman, playboy model on the X axis up the top. And then running down the Y axis, it's like lost car keys, left kids in a mall. like lost car keys um left kids in a mall and and then it's just like all the the six different reactions among those those different variables it's really fucking weird it's so weird to see such a like mathematical approach to trying to make a joke very like nakedly but it's completely not funny and it just goes really long and you're like i see what you're trying to do like i get it you're trying to do callbacks but it's never because it never it never accelerates it's like being in a it's like going for a road trip and you're driving like 100 kilometers and you leave the driveway

at 15 kilometers because there's children in the neighborhood and And then the whole way, the car never accelerates. You're just only going at 15 kilometers. And you're like, why are we doing this? This doesn't make sense. Very strange to see. What did you think of Al King's performance, Guy? Did it rescue the special for you? Rescue is a generous word. It was satisfying to see someone who was good at their job.

And actually, that's not fair to the pianist. Yeah, yeah. The pianist was fantastic. Yeah. And so, yeah. She's got a great voice. I mean, there's no denying it. He then, like, after delivering, I don't know,

half of his special railing against his wife and kids. It's more. It's honestly more. It's more than 50%. He brings them all out on stage as well. And it's like, it's this weird sort of, honestly, it reads to me as this weird sort of insecure, like he's aware he's released something.

He's aware that this product is not up to snuff he's aware he might not still carry the goodwill of the audience in the in the theater or at home and so you're wrong what is it you're completely wrong that's not what it is he does not have that level of self-awareness guy he absolutely doesn't it's more like um a kid dragging their parents to a music recital where they've been learning violin for six weeks and the parents have to like applaud and praise the effort that was done for something that is awful

and painful to listen to. He doesn't, he's not trying to undo any evil that he thinks he's done because he just does not have the brain capacity to recognize yeah what he's up to it's um it's borderline unwatchable and i look forward to six more screenings with my friend tim and perhaps a variety of guests perhaps one perhaps none but um certainly anyone we can rope into joining us on this severely misguided journey um you know how i'd love to get and i shouldn't say this on the podcast it's a bad idea to like say things out loud to to throw ideas out when there's no intention

of like making it happen i would love to get sloths on to talk about this special. Yeah, that's a good idea. I was actually messaging with him yesterday. I'll ask. Dude, you should. That's very fortuitous. It feels like the universe is trying to tee it up. We should do it. I would absolutely love, love, love, love to watch this over the internet and chat about it with slobs yeah um it is yeah

it's so first review i guess we'll do it out of seven because we're going to do seven screenings i give rob schneider's asian mama mexican kids one out of seven i'm also going to give it a one and i will qualify the one star because of the pianist and al king's appearance my one is because he made it and it's easy for us to sit back and talk shit but he made it he paid a lot of money for it to go to air and for that i say well done you