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Rob Schneider is a comedian and writer, best known for Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Here, the 60-year-old shares his mother’s effective discipline strategy, working with Sharon Stone and why his marriage works.
“My daughters are coming to Australia with me. They want to go to Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo to pet a koala.”
My Filipino maternal grandmother, Victoria, was a war survivor. She married an American soldier at 15. He tried to bring her to the US, but his family wasn’t keen and so it never happened. I was eight when I met her in her homeland. She had fallen down the stairs and could no longer speak.
My paternal grandmotherMolly, had a thick Yiddish accent. There was room on her lap for all us kids: it was big. Nobody smelled like her – she smelled like a bag of dust, and even at four years old I knew that wasn’t a good smell. She died when I was five.
My mother, Pilar, was a teacher and I used to watch her teach. She was so kind and the children loved her, but I never saw the “pinch and twist” there, like she did with us at home. She would pinch us to get our attention, and then twist to make sure the bad behaviour wouldn’t be replicated.
My mother spoke five languages. She was able to be educated because during World War II, her sister Rose found money in a cave, along with other things she thought might be valuable that looked like pineapples.[The money paid for her education and the “pineapples” were hand grenades.]
The Japanese killed my mother’s two brothers, but she held no bitterness. She knew it was war and that you can’t blame a whole nationality for anything. Mine wasn’t a smooth childhood, but I felt a sense of empowerment and strength from her. She died in 2021.
My father, Marvin, was Jewish. The jokes were good on my father’s side of the family, but the food was tastier on my mother’s. As the youngest, I learnt pretty early that creating laughs was a way to get attention.
I was 16 when I discovered stand-up comedy and thought, “I want to do this.” Hence, I didn’t spend much time in school. My dad bought me an old police car for $500 and I worked in a petrol station in the afternoons and sold shoes on the weekend.
At night I drove to The Comedy Store and watched greats like Robin Williams and Jerry Seinfeld. I was a kid going, “This is the greatest time of my life.”
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