Vince Vaughn criticises “agenda-based” late-night talk-shows, claims they have “stopped being funny”
Comedy actor Vince Vaughn has taken shots at American late-night television hosts for being “agenda-based”.
Vaughn made the comments on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, one of the world’s most popular podcasts that previously platformed Donald Trump and JD Vance ahead of the 2024 election.
During the discussion, the demise of late-night television was brought up by Von, who posited that “the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was just like white redneck kind of people”.
In response, Vaughn noted that the gap has been filled by podcasts, which he said was due to “people want authenticity”, before adding, “I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based.”
He added, “They were going to evangelical 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.”
Vaughn then put the declining ratings of American late-night shows like The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel Live down to them morphing into becoming “the same show”.
The Dodgeball star continued, “They all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad. Imagine sitting next to someone like that on a fucking plane. You’d be like, how do I get out of this fucking seat.”
Vaughn also said during the podcast that Hollywood is “not really” a truly liberal place, stating of the industry’s default position, “‘We’re smart and have got it figured out, if you don’t agree, you’re an idiot’. Not liberal in the way we think, where it’s all groovy.”
Vaughn visited the White House in 2025 to meet President Trump, but has previously maintained being a libertarian rather than a follower of a specific political party.
During an interview with the New York Times Magazine in 2024, Vaughn said that he is a “believer more in allowing individuals to make choices” in regards to his political ideology, and “I’d rather say let people make their choices, and they can make different choices and have the consequences of their choices.”
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