Hollywood star Vince Vaughn lamented the politicization of late-night comedy through the years, saying the major network shows all fused into a singular narrative that felt less like comedy and more like a lecture.
The Wedding Crashers star revealed his thoughts about late-night during an appearance on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend. While Vaughn agreed that politics are “part of the job” late-night due to having to discuss current events, he felt the hosts stopped making “fun of everybody.”
“You don’t want to become part of a group and feel like you’re a champion for one ideology. You want to make fun of everybody,” said Vaughn.
When Von called Hollywood a “liberal place,” the actor said it was more like a homogenous culture of agreed-upon ideas.
“It’s more like, ‘We’re smart and got it figured out, and if you don’t agree then you’re an idiot,’” said Vaughn. “There was definitely a culture that if you didn’t agree with these ideas, you were looked at as bad.”
The two agreed that this mentality became a governing principle with late-night TV.
“A lot of the late shows have struggled because … the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was white, redneck kind of people, and then everything tanked after that,” said Von.
“The podcasts have gotten so much more popular with less production, less writers, less staff. And the reason is … people want authenticity,” added Vaughn. “The talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to [evangelize] people to what they thought. And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic. It felt like they had an agenda. It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a fucking class I didn’t want to take. I’m getting scolded.”
Vaughn also dismissed those who would blame technology for the decline in late-night TV viewership.
“The phenomenon isn’t what they say. They always blame technology, but the reality is it’s the approach,” he said.
“People are going to tune into a podcast more so because they want to feel like people are having a real conversation. It’s interesting to them,” he continued. “But if you look at what happened to the talk shows and why their ratings are low, it’s got only to do with the fact of what you just said, which is they all became the same show. They all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad.”
