Vince Vaughn Says Comedies That Try Not to Offend Are A ‘Snoozefest’

Who’s to blame for the death of the R-rated movie comedy? 

Vince Vaughn pointed a habañero-stained finger at scaredy-cat entertainment executives when he appeared on Hot Ones earlier this month. “They just overthink it,” he said between bites of earthy, peppery wings. “The people in charge don’t want to get fired more so than they’re looking to do something great. They want to follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone that don’t really translate. But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ‘Well look, I crunched the numbers.’” 

Movie comedy wasn’t like that when Vaughn was a young’n. “I remember when we first shot (Wedding) Crashers, we were going super (R-rated), and we would do stuff and it was fun because we were almost making a movie for ourselves to be funny and there was no ‘parents’ around,” he told Variety, presumably making air quotes with his fingers. “I think that’s a big problem now.”

Comedy unlocked Vaughn’s whole career. “When Todd (Phillips) came to me with Old School, it felt fun and interesting. But by then, I remember that he said, ‘The studio’s not sure that you can be funny’ because I had done mainly dramatic, independent movies since Swingers. But obviously once I did Old School, it opened up this road to these movies that I was excited to participate in that also happened to be very commercial.”

That’s the problem — those Old School R-rated comedies were money back in the 2000s, and they definitely knew it. These days, similar attempts at comedy tank at the box office, from Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings to the raunchy Bottoms to Jamie Foxx and Will Ferrell’s dirty-dog comedy Strays. 

It’s hard to say why, but Vaughn thinks Old Man Movie Studio is forcing today’s comedy kids to be too sensitive. “Like Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘If you open a window and try to please everyone, you’ll catch pneumonia,’” Vaughn explained on Hot Ones. “I think the stuff that does resonate is always things that at least feel like they’re being authentic to the piece. They’re not trying to code it in a way that feels responsible. That feels like a snoozefest to me; a responsible comedy feels like a time to take a nap.”

So while Vaughn reviews ballsy jokes for that Dodgeball sequel, young comedians need to let loose without adult supervision. “You’ve got to let young people go make a movie and leave them alone,” he argued to Sean Evans. “They’ll figure it out in the end.”