Vince Vaughn Lays Out Tired Reason Why He Thinks Late Night Is Dying

I’m very much aware that late-night talk shows are going the way of the dodo and won’t pretend they were some iron-clad idea that was never going to fail. But I also refuse to strip them of one very important piece of context: they are made to air on television at a certain time. If people watch them at that time, they make money through ads. If people don’t watch, they don’t make as much money. And, in a world where people can watch whatever they want whenever they want, they don’t have to adhere to the schedule of a network.

But don’t tell Vince Vaughn that! The famed comedic actor recently sat down with Theo Von and claimed that the problem with late-night shows is that they are too political and lack authenticity. Did he say that to a man who invited our current president on the same show and treated him with the softest of kid gloves? He did! But let’s not invite too much context into this discussion, because then Vaughn’s stupid argument falls apart in about five seconds.

“I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to evangelical people to what they thought,” Vaughn said on the show, according to Deadline. “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 f***ing class I didn’t want to take.” To be clear, at most, some of these shows will do a monologue calling out the president for doing something awful, and that, to Vaughn, feels like being in class. Noted.

There is certainly a world where people feel so tired of politics from a comedy show that they turn it off, but this is not that world. The Daily Show brings in record numbers. Saturday Night Live seems stuck in a Twilight Zone episode of their own making, where every week they have to find a way to force the president into the cold open, and those segments get a lot of eyeballs on the old YouTube. People complaining about a corrupt administration did not kill late-night, ease did.

Vaughn is not wrong that people have easier access to podcasts, and some of them are pretty shaggy. There usually aren’t any writers or a band. But they’re also insanely easy to access through technology, which Vaughn specifically says is not the reason late-night talk shows are dying, and that is just incorrect, no matter how many times Theo nodded along like a deer caught in headlights. People can get whatever shows they want pretty much whenever they want. That’s going to have more of an effect than what hosts are talking about.