I’m a day late with this one, but Vince Vaughn has been on a bit of a rampage of late. He’s pointing the finger at Hollywood in their failure to make great comedies this decade. Vaughn says it’s all because of political correctness.
Last week, Vaughn appeared on Hot Ones. “They just overthink it,” he said about Hollywood execs. “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.’”
“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 tells Variety, presumably making air quotes with his fingers. “I think that’s a big problem now.”
It’s no secret that in the ‘90s and ‘00s, R-rated comedies were profitable. These days, they barely get made. There could be a number of reasons for this shift, but Vaughn thinks it’s the movie studios forcing comedians to not offend and be more aware of sensitivities.
“Like Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘If you open a window and try to please everyone, you’ll catch pneumonia,’” Vaughn explained to Variety. “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 snoozefests to me; a responsible comedy feels like a time to take a nap.”
More recently, Jennifer Lawrence shared similar thoughts. The actress told Variety that the lack of R-rated comedies had to do with today’s cultural sensibilities where anyone can be offended by anything: “It really is hard to make a comedy where you’re not offending people.”
Chris Rock blamed “cancel culture” for making comedy “unfunny.” This past March, Jerry Seinfeld blamed the “extreme left” and “PC crap” for ruining comedy:
This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people. Now they’re going to see stand up comics because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly.
Last year, former Amazon Studios head Roy Price noticed raw data regarding comedies and shared it via Twitter. His findings showed that the number of comedies being theatrically released, on a year-to-year basis, had plummeted in recent years.
In 1997, comedies made up 20 percent of the total movie market. In 2003, comedies peaked at 21.4 percent — that year had “Old School,” “Bad Santa,” “The School of Rock,” “Elf,” “Freaky Friday” and “A Mighty Wind.”
By 2020, the comedic market share went down to a record low 3.8 percent.
Has our culture lost its sense of humor? We need to laugh now, more than ever. This has turned into such a self-serious era. It’s time for fearless filmmakers to bring back edgy comedy and be unafraid of the repercussions that might come with it.
Comedians like to push and push and push until that very fine line of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable is somewhat squeezed to its very limit. As George Carlin once said, “It’s a comedian’s duty to find the line and deliberately cross over it.” That, to me at least, is what some of the very best comedy can do.
In our fevered and amplified reality, powered by social media, the outrage police consistently like to point out whenever someone has crossed that line.
