Vince Vaughn is going after late night shows and their hosts for feeling agenda-based, comparing the experience to being at school.
While appearing on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast Tuesday, the two attempted to unpack the discourse behind late night TV’s tanking ratings and why podcast shows like Von and Joe Rogan’s are seeing increased viewers and landing as big, or bigger stars. Vaughn thought it came down to authenticity and not feeling like they’re being fed an agenda.
“People want authenticity and I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based,” Vaughn said. “They were going to evangelize people to what they thought. 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 f–king class I didn’t want to take.”
He added: “If you look at what happened to the talk shows and why their ratings are so low, it’s got only to do with the fact of what you just said, which is they all became the same show. And they all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad and it’s like imagine sitting next to someone like that on a f–king plane. You’d be like, ‘How do I get out of this f–king seat?’”
Despite being adamant he’s a libertarian, Vaughn has appeared to lean toward the political right more since Donald Trump took office for his second term. He visited Trump at the White House in April 2025.
The actor lamented changing times, saying that R-rated comedies, including career highlights “Old School” and “Wedding Crashers,” could never be made today, as executives are more interested in the next intellectual property.
“The people in charge don’t want to get fired moreso 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,” Vaughn said. “But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game Payday so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’”
You can watch Vaughn’s full podcast appearance in the video above.
