Does Will Ferrell's Brand of Comedy Work Without Adam McKay?

The delusional, loud blowhard who doesn’t know he’s the joke is still alive because The Righteous Gemstones spent four seasons proving it. Danny McBride’s Jesse Gemstone is a direct descendant of Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby — all that unearned confidence, the non-sequitur eruptions, the inability to read a room — and he is one of the funniest characters on television.

So when Netflix dropped the trailer for The Hawk, Will Ferrell’s new golf comedy about a washed-up legend named Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins who refuses to accept that 2004 was twenty years ago, the question isn’t whether the character archetype still holds. It’s whether Ferrell can still access it without the one collaborator who always seemed to know what to do with it.

That collaborator is Adam McKay, and his absence from Ferrell’s recent work has been noticeable.

Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, The Other Guys — all McKay. All good-to-great. Then McKay goes prestige (The Big Short, Vice, Don’t Look Up), and Ferrell without him becomes a different, and significantly less reliable. Holmes & Watson is wretched. Downhill is somehow worse because it’s trying to be something. Eurovision is fine, at best. Same with You’re All Cordially Invited, a movie I’ve seen but forget exists. Maybe Ferrell just doesn’t work without McKay.

What McKay and all his personal issues understood is that the non-sequitur only works when it’s character-revealing, as it was with Ricky Bobby and Ron Burgundy. McBride evolved that form in a direction Ferrell hasn’t quite managed on his own. The Gemstones are delusional blowhards, sure, but they’re also genuinely dangerous, genuinely wounded, and the comedy lives in the gap between who they think they are and who they actually are.

In The Hawk, Lonnie Hawkins is 58 years old (Ferrell’s actual age), trying to complete golf’s Grand Slam two decades past his prime, and the comedy of that situation is inseparable from the sadness of it. That might still work in 2026 because Talladega Nights never had to carry that weight. Ricky Bobby’s delusion was funny because the stakes were zero. Lonnie’s delusion might actually matter, and if the show is smart enough to lean into that, and if David Gordon Green can manage that tonal balance, it won’t matter as much that McKay’s not in the room.

But if it’s just Ferrell doing the bit — the bluster, the non-sequiturs, the “Lonnie Juice,” the puma painted on the RV — without another layer, then it’s going to feel like exactly what his post-McKay career has often felt like: Will Ferrell doing an impression of himself. We’ll see if it still has any juice come July.