Comedian Jamie Kennedy loves , but thinks Hollywood has traded in originality and movie-star mystique for ideology and influencers. Still, the actor doubled down on show business. Comedy can cut through, he said, and save an industry that has lost its nerve.
The ‘Scream’ star was critical of the modern media landscape, but not bitter. He told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that he was encouraged by what he sees as a return to center for Hollywood, or at least for .
Kennedy argued that comedy remains one of the few places in entertainment where people with different politics, backgrounds and identities can still share a stage.
“I think the community in the arts,” he said. “A laugh is a laugh.”
Kennedy pointed to comedian Margaret Cho, a fellow stand-up with whom he has worked in the past.
“I love Margaret. I’ve worked with her in multiple shows,” he said. “She’s awesome. She’s probably radically different than me on the political spectrum, but she’s hilarious, and she’s cool, and she should always, always have an opinion and I should always be able to have my opinion.”
Outside the comedy club, however, he said it is difficult for people to “just coexist.”
“People won’t accept reality,” Kennedy said. “They don’t want to accept certain things. And they want to silence you. And that is crazy, because you should have a voice … When they start speech for questioning something, that’s insanity. And it’s like, what happened to discourse?”
Kennedy said he believes audiences are less interested in being offended and more eager for comedians to take big swings again. Humor is necessary, he argued, to question politics, celebrity and culture.
Reflecting on “Malibu’s Most Wanted,” the 2003 comedy film following his wannabe rapper character, B-Rad, who is abducted by a pair of actors hired by his senator father in order to scare him straight, Kennedy said something similarly satirical “100%” could be created today, and “200%” should be.
“We’re on the tail and of everyone being upset, so I think the people just don’t care anymore, and I think the people are going to come back again,” Kennedy said. “And we learned from the last seven or eight years of the great wokeness â which, some of it was good, we should have had, but a lot of it became nonsense … Stuff like [‘Malibu’s Most Wanted’] is needed to question things.”
He surmised that networks today might be more hesitant to buy a product like “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment,” his sketch comedy/hidden camera prank show hybrid that ran in the early 2000s, but also that attitudes were changing.
“I think we’re coming back, though, because we’re sick of comedy being considered so many different things,” Kennedy said. “They tried to crush it. But I think that it could [be made] now. But for a few years there everything offended everybody, which is wild.”
“I think social media gave everybody a voice. And a lot of people should have laryngitis. I think if you’re woke, take an Ambien,” Kennedy told .
The comedian was critical of “woke” Hollywood, saying the term was co-opted by popular culture and has lost its meaning. He also took issue with the influencer craze he thinks has pervaded Hollywood, not because he sees social media as an illegitimate avenue to success, but because attention does not always equate to quality, he said.
“, I’m not coming for you. I think you should do it,” Kennedy said. “Get your money. Have fun, but … Attention. This is the issue. Attention does not mean it’s great. It just means you’re great at getting attention, and that’s the problem. We’ve become a psycho culture, like, ‘Are you looking at me? How many views I got?’ I mean, it’s psychotic.”
He likened influencers hawking sponsored products to “a live-action QVC,” and said he wished they would be more transparent.
“Don’t act like you are important. Don’t like you’re cool. Unless you can play a riff like Jo
