This December, Warner Bros. Pictures will bring Wedding Crashers back to select theaters for special 20th anniversary screenings, which will delight all of the die-hard fans of the sex comedy who aren’t currently on house arrest.
On July 15, 2005, Warner Bros. released a movie that would change the way former frat bros would prepare for wedding season forever with Wedding Crashers, a smash-hit R-rated comedy filled with tits, ass and so many gay jokes. Starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, Wedding Crashers told the story of a couple of predatory bachelors who sneak into strangers’ weddings with the intention of tricking the prettiest bridesmaids into appearing in a montage of sex scenes, one which became a formative moment for so many pre-teen boys across the country who, in fitting fashion, similarly infiltrated a screening of the film at their local theater.
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Starting on December 4th, those now-grown Wedding Crashers fans will get to re-live the glory days of 2005, back when the R-rated comedy was still king and screenwriters could get away with a graphic rape plot or two.
Look, I don’t want to be the “cancel old comedy, all risky jokes are problematic, put a trigger warning in Blazing Saddles” kind of critic whom the anti-woke comedy community loves to complain about, but it just feels crazy to me that, two decades after Wedding Crashers grossed nearly $300 million at the box office, we, as comedy fans, aren’t all unified in our feelings about that scene around the beginning of the second act.
As fans of Wedding Crashers will recall, when Wilson and Vaughn’s characters, Jeremy and John, join the blue-blooded Cleary family on a weekend retreat, Jeremy spends a night with Isla Fisher’s character Gloria that was straight out of a Ryan Murphy true-crime series. Gloria, whose alluring, virginal innocence turns out to be a coy act, reveals herself to be a sadistic bondage enthusiast who non-consensually subjects Jeremy to some extreme sex acts that the audience is supposed to find hilarious.
In case that wasn’t fucked up enough, just a few scenes later, Jeremy realizes that he has fallen deeply in love with his rapist, and the couple go on to live happily ever after while experimenting with even more depraved sexual fantasies.
For some reason, tons of comedy writers in the aughts were obsessed with the hilarious set-up of a woman sexually abusing a man, but Wedding Crashers stands out as arguably the most egregious instance of a sex crime being played for laughs from that decade. And, sure, defenders of Wedding Crashers will say that rape jokes, along with the uncomfortable homophobic plot line regarding Gloria’s brother Todd, were simply a product of the time period, but that’s kind of my point: There are some comedies that we can leave behind in their era.
What audiences find funny is constantly changing, and it’s okay if comedy itself moves on from certain jokes, conventions and films — after all, there’s a good reason why Looney Tunes has relegated Pepé Le Pew to the background.
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