Vince Vaughn has been in a lot of classic comedies, usually playing a similar haughty character — potentially with a heart of gold buried deep down — who takes cues from Will Ferrell's yell-y comedic stylings (albeit with some nuance). Later this week, Vaughn's new Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey will premiere, and he's been making the press rounds to promote it, decrying so-called cancel culture all the while.
In a new interview with Variety, the actor said that feeling the need to be "responsible" with comedy in this day and age is making for more and more "snoozefest" movies.
"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," Vaughn told journalist Todd Gilchrist. "I think that's a big problem now — you've got to let young people go make a movie and leave them alone. They'll figure it out in the end."
The actor added that films like the S. Craig Zahler-directed 2017 neo-noir he starred in, Brawl in Cell Block 99, struck a chord with audiences "because there's something that feels provocative, in the sense that it's allowing itself to be what it wants to be. It's not worrying about offending anyone."
Vaughn added, "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."
Appearing on a recent episode of Hot Ones, the actor explained that the R-rated comedies he's famous for — like Wedding Crashers, Swingers and Old School — aren't being made anymore because executives "overthink it." In between wings, Vaughn said, "The people in charge don't want to get fired more so than they're looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don't really translate."