‘Wedding Crashers’ and ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ at 20: Peak Frat Pack Meets Apex Apatow

It may be hard to picture 20 years later, when comedy stars mostly appear in their own siloed Netflix vehicles, but in the mid-2000s, there was a whole group of comedians who frequently worked together in an unofficial network that the press dubbed the Frat Pack. Appropriately, the major breakthrough of this collaboration came with 2003’s campus comedy Old School, starring Luke Wilson, Vince Vaugh, and Will Ferrell; it was solidified the following year with movies like Starsky & Hutch (starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, supported by Vaughn, with a cameo from Ferrell), Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (starring Stiller and Vaughn), and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (starring Ferrell, with bit roles for his Old School co-stars, plus Stiller and Jack Black, and bringing Paul Rudd and Steve Carell into the fray). But the group’s box office zenith arrived another year after that, with the release of Wedding Crashers.

Wedding Crashers isn’t as star-packed as some of the previous Frat Pack comedies – though it does feature an uncredited cameo from Ferrell in the final stretch. Mostly, though, it’s a duet between Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, playing a pair of lifelong best friends who pick up women at weddings where they haven’t been invited, using assumed names and identities. Their real selves are John (Wilson) and Jeremy (Vaughn), though they might as well be called Owen and Vince – not because the actors are definitely playing themselves, but because they successfully and nonchalantly create the illusion that they are. Wilson is playing the same flaky-sounding but conniving good-vibes surfer without a board, while Vaughn is essentially playing an older version of the motormouthed Trent, his breakout role in Swingers a decade earlier.

The R-rated comedy opened big in July 2005 and held on for the rest of the summer. It arguably paved the way for The Hangover, another guys-being-guys comedy, from Frat Pack director Todd Phillips, and though that movie was a bigger hit, it also didn’t feature any of the core Frat Pack guys (although Bradley Cooper appears in Crashers, he’s not a core Frat Packer). Wedding Crashers was their moment, and rewatching it two decades later, it’s striking how better-natured it comes across than The Hangover or its sour-spirited sequels, despite some baggy pacing and clunky editing. Like a lot of comedies, it’s all in the personalities driving the action: John and Jeremy are cads, but their manner of caddishness involves genuine endearment and human connection, even if it’s as insubstantial as the one-night stands that result.

Wilson and Vaughn are able to make this more charming than creepy because they so clearly get a kick out of each other; the two of them gassing each other up is just as funny as a contentious disagreement. Of course, they must run into conflict when John pursues Claire (Rachel McAdams) past her sister’s wedding and into an unlikely weekend getaway, forcing Jeremy to also continue his non-relationship with the bride’s other sister Gloria (Isla Fisher), a “stage-five clinger.” But for the most part, this isn’t a buddy comedy about guys constantly bickering with each other. It’s about two guys struggling to support each other, and when they do the obligatory friendship split, it has a sting of genuine sadness.

In retrospect, the summer of 2005, at the midpoint of the 2000s, was where the dominant Frat Pack mode of comedy crystalized into dude-centric romantic comedies, smuggling the same themes of more traditional rom-coms beneath a lot of R-rated raunch and banter. That’s evident in Wedding Crashers, where John gets way more wistful about Claire than you might remember from all the Wilson/Vaughn shenanigans; and it’s evident in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, its complementary not-quite-soulmate comedy released about a month later.

Wedding Crashers is about a couple of aging, never-married bachelors who use the emotional tenor of weddings to get laid; 40-Year-Old Virgin is about a bachelor with no game who’s never been laid (and, in a sweet comic twist that could also be read as an admission of the film’s secretly conservative bent, only winds up having sex after he gets married). Virgin shows far less than Wedding Crashers, which has the requisite guy-courting nudity, but its talk is much, much filthier. Crashers, though ostensibly a buddy comedy, only re-affirms its duo’s friendship; it’s Virgin where Andy (Steve Carell) has a kind of platonic courtship with a new group of guy friends. There’s still some gay panic in the air in both movies: The famous “you know how I know you’re gay?” exchange between Virgin’s Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, ultimately absurdist (and belying the characters’ ease and comfort with each other) but still super bro’d out; and the shockingly hacky material involving Claire’s weirdly predatory misfit brother Todd (Keir O’Connell) stalking Jeremy for zany discomfort. Even here, you can see a little softening of material that would likely be nastier in a Todd Phillips movie. One of the best gags in Wedding Crashers is that Jeremy, after just barely evading Todd’s advances, firmly decides he will keep the nude painting Todd created of him. However minutely, the bros’ minds were opening as the social circle expanded – though including well-rounded gay characters was still, at this point, a bridge too far.

Apatow’s new guy buddies ushered in another batch of sorta-Frat Packers, making bigger stars of Carell and Paul Rudd while introducing Seth Rogen, with Jason Segel and other Judd Apatow acolytes not far behind. This arguably created a Frat Pack schism of sorts. It was the first film directed by Apatow, who produced Frat Pack classic Anchorman but whose sensibilities ultimately lean more James L. Brooks than Ivan Reitman as far as ’80s comedy guys go. It wasn’t a complete split, but it’s noticeable how after 2005, most Apatow-related movies either went in a more grounded-dramedy direction (like his Knocked Up, starring Rogen) or a wilder, more satirical direction (like the other Ferrell comedies he produced). Vaughn, the Wilsons, and Stiller are nowhere in sight for these; Vaughn in particular went after straight-down-the-middle stuff like Four Christmases (with his Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin) or Couples Retreat. In his sitcommy way, he took the domesticated ending of Crashers just as seriously as Apatow took the worlds of Virgin (love/sex), Knocked Up (kids), and This is 40 (marriage). Stiller, for example, would also explore these areas, but mostly in movies that had nothing to do with his former collaborators.

Through no particular falling out, the Frat Pack dissolved just as it seemed to be expanding. By the time Wilson and Vaughn reunited for The Internship eight years later, it felt pretty toothless. Part of that is the movie itself, an extended Google ad disguised as midlife cheerleading. But a moment had also passed; The Watch, a year earlier, teamed Stiller, Vaughn, and Jonah Hill, and no one much card. On the admittedly wide-net Frat Pat Wikipedia page list of projects, most of the major entries from the past 10 years are animated movies that pick up as many talented comedians as possible to fill out voice roles. It’s not unusual to see a couple of these guys pop up in the same movie together, but they’ve mostly gone their separate ways. Unlike a lot of raunchy bro comedies, Wedding Crashers and 40-Year-Old Virgin both end with weddings, just like old-fashioned rom-coms often did. They didn’t exactly send the Frat Pack off into the sunset, but in retrospect, the bachelor-comedy life wasn’t long for this world.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.