David Schneider is the man on the other side of the desk: the weatherman who takes the credit, the commissioner who does not want Monkey Tennis. A long partnership with Armando Iannucci has made him one of British satire's most useful writers.
Fi1m perspective
On screen, David Schneider is usually the man the joke has to get past. In The Day Today (1994) his Sylvester Stuart does the weather as if it were a personal achievement. In I'm Alan Partridge (1997) he is Tony Hayers, the BBC commissioner across the lunch table while Alan pitches a dozen programmes, one of them called Monkey Tennis, each worse than the last. Coogan gets the laughs. Schneider gets the pauses between them, and he plays Hayers as the polite face of an institution that made up its mind before the lunch began.
That is the smaller half of what he does. He started in physical comedy, at university and with the National Theatre in the 1980s, then joined Armando Iannucci on the radio for On the Hour, which became The Day Today on television. He is one of eight credited writers on that series, and the density shows: a first viewing misses a third of the jokes because they are in the corner of the screen. Hayers followed from 1994, and from the mid-1990s came supporting film parts, among them the scientist who opens 28 Days Later (2002). The nearest thing to a complaint anyone makes about him is that these parts are small, and they are.
Then, in 2017, The Death of Stalin, which he wrote with Iannucci, Ian Martin and Fabien Nury. It is the news-desk instinct turned on men who could have you killed. The screenplay makes the fight between Khrushchev and Beria legible through insults, evasions and frantic changes of position, and the lines are funny because the men cannot speak freely even to their supposed colleagues. We laughed at the first round of jockeying and then found the laugh drying up, because the writing never lets us forget what happens to the man who guesses wrong. That is hard to do. Our reservation is the one we had when we reviewed it: the broader clowning occasionally makes the danger harder to believe, and four credited writers must share that as well as the credit. Schneider has said of the collaboration: "It was like writing with a best mate."
He has worked with Iannucci five times, and the pattern is plain. Schneider is at his best when there is a format to copy exactly, a bulletin, a commissioning lunch, a fight over who succeeds Stalin, and someone inside it who believes the format will protect him. He has lately been directing, three series of Josh and episodes of Avenue 5 (2020–2022), which is where a writer who understands rooms tends to end up. If you want the case for him in an evening, watch the lunch, then The Death of Stalin, and notice how much of the comedy in both is people working out what they are allowed to say.
Biography
David Schneider is a British comedian, actor, writer and director. He was born in London on 22 May 1963 and studied modern languages at Exeter College, Oxford, where he also began doctoral research in Yiddish drama.
Schneider is known for his long collaboration with Armando Iannucci. He played the BBC commissioning editor Tony Hayers in the Alan Partridge series Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge and I'm Alan Partridge (1997). He co-wrote the screenplay for the 2017 film The Death of Stalin. His acting credits include small roles in Mission: Impossible (1996), 28 Days Later (2002) and A Knight's Tale (2001). He has also directed television comedy including Avenue 5 and the BBC series Josh.
