Why Will Ferrell became the great anti-macho comedian of his generation 

In a bid to tap into millennial humor, Amazon Prime Video’s latest original movie, You’re Cordially Invited, looks like a Reese Witherspoon romance and a Will Ferrell absurdist comedy rolled into one. Ferrell appears on the billboards with Witherspoon, but also wrestling an alligator, in a nod to his earlier movies Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) and Semi Pro (2008), in which he fought with bears.

Released on January 30, You’re Cordially Invited plays on the strengths of both stars who, until now, had only coincided in a Saturday Night Live sketch in 2001. The collision of their two worlds is baked into a plot about a double booking of two weddings. Witherspoon, who plays the sister of one of the brides, is a haughty, cosmopolitan woman forced to reconnect with her roots; Ferrell plays the father of the other bride, a man who is both immature and sensitive.

In Ferrell’s case, the role is a variation on those he has played before — from dads fearful of failing as male role models in Daddy’s Home (2015) to tyrannical businessman in The LEGO Movie (2014) and Barbie (2023). In You Are Cordially Invited, the 57-year-old Californian plays a widowed man devoted to his daughter, who has mixed feelings about her upcoming marriage. While the film may not be what fans might expect of Ferrell, there is a hilarious rendition of a Kenny Loggins and Dolly Parton classic with his daughter — rising comedic talent Geraldine Viswanathan — and a joke about girls in Nazi uniforms that will strike a familiar chord.

But Ferrell continues to infuse one of the quintessential themes of his films with nuance. “Will Ferrell’s films and his comedic persona revolve around questioning masculinity,” film and television historian Dr. R. Colin Tait, Ph.D., tells EL PAÍS. “Often, this means highlighting the absurdity and failure of outdated masculine norms, such as Ron Burgundy’s over-the-top machismo in Anchorman. Other times, Ferrell’s characters explore the myths and stereotypes of modern masculinity, as in Old School (2003), in which his outlandish behavior stems from his inability to adapt to changing family dynamics.”

Tait published an article on Ferrell’s humor titled Absurd Masculinity in 2014 in The Communication Review. In it, he explored the performer’s recurring interest in characters endowed with a certain “masculine hysteria,” reflecting the identity crisis of 21st-century men. His narrative arcs frequently trace the journey from a “fixed, backward-looking masculinity” to overcoming typically male prejudices and flaws.

The key to Will Ferrell’s success is his genuinely likeable comic persona that relies on overdetermined and excessively masculine and feminine traits. Accordingly, Tait’s article argues that despite criticism surrounding Ferrell’s comedic films, they actually have a great deal to tell us about masculinity and comedy in the new millennium. By discussing Anchorman, Elf, and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Tait asserts that Ferrell’s films map changes to masculine identity in the post-9/11 era by their representations of absurd masculinity embodied in Ferrell’s comic persona.

Friendship

Tait believes that some critics have not paid enough attention to what Will Ferrell’s films tell us — or at least not until the dialogue in Anchorman was converted into memes. However, it is not lost on him that Ferrell’s satire could also be misinterpreted by some who might see it as an invitation to adopt the exaggerated behaviors of characters like Ron Burgundy. It is an audience that will probably be shaking its head on seeing the actor in real life expressing tenderness, empathy and rejection of retrograde positions.

Last fall, Ferrell released the emotional documentary Will and Harper (2024), starring the actor and one of his best friends, screenwriter Harper Steele, who came out as a trans woman during the pandemic. Steele has been writing jokes for Ferrell since the turn of the century for Saturday Night Live and is the author of several of his more eccentric films, such as the Spanish-language talkie Casa de mi Padre (2012), and the musical Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020). In Will and Harper, the couple embarks on a journey across the U.S. and, along the way, discuss “everything you wanted to know and never dared to ask a trans woman.”

Although the predominant point of view is Ferrell’s, the movie is groundbreaking within the genre of comedy in which trans issues only seems to exist to talk about freedom of expression or offense. The documentary also doesn’t shy away from depicting the transphobia Steele faces, with Ferrell visibly moved, crying at the cruelty with which her friend is treated and correcting people who misgender her.

The comedian’s commitment to friendship was something his fans witnessed in 2021, when filmmaker Adam McKay — Ferrell’s close collaborator, who directed him in The Anchorman, Step Brothers, The Other Guys, The Big Short (2015), and The Newsroom (2013), all co-written between them — revealed that they had stopped speaking after Ferrell felt betrayed for not landing a role he had specifically requested. McKay and Ferrell also announced the dissolution of their production company, Gary Sanchez Productions, which had been behind their films, the Funny or Die video website, and even the modern television phenomenon Succession (2018). Comedy journalist Saul Austerlitz notes, “his collaborations with McKay were, overall, more solid than the films that followed,” although he also recognizes works like Will Ferrell’s and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga as significant achievements.

“Ferrell was the co-writer of many of his [McKay’s] most successful films,” Austerlitz says. “What these films have in common is a persistent interest in childish, self-absorbed men who are forced to mature. The humor lies in how much Ferrell drags his feet on the road to maturity.”

Austerlitz is the author of Kind of a Big Deal (2023), a book devoted to the ins and outs of Anchorman, based on interviews. He believes that the film, which is about the trauma men feel in a 1970s newsroom when a woman arrives to outshine them, deserves to be considered the “most iconic” comedy of the 21st century. In his book, he analyzes its reflections on feminism, media, fragile masculinity and nostalgia. Of McKay, he says that his subsequent movies, such as The Big Short (2015) “have taken the political undertones of a pure comedy like Anchorman and brought them to the surface.” He added, “I deeply respect his desire to take a turn as a filmmaker, especially in the current era of political turmoil.”

A father of three children, ages 20, 18 and 15, and married to Swedish actress and producer Viveca Paulin whom he met in acting class in the mid-1990s, Ferrell has 25 years of stardom behind him. He was in landmark Saturday Night Live sketches like More Cowbell, What Is Love and send-ups of then-president Bush — whom he refused to meet in real life — before the success of Elf established him as a big-screen presence. “Ferrell was willing to go further than most comedians in search of a laugh, whether it was running naked through the streets in Old School or growing a ridiculous mustache in Anchorman,” says Austerlitz.

The comedian continues to serve as a producer with another label, Gloria Sanchez, a former division of the now-defunct Gary Sanchez, created in 2014 to release projects with a greater female presence, in front and behind the camera. Female-directed hits have come out of there, such as Hustlers from 2019. In an interview in The Hollywood Reporter, Will Ferrell offered a different version of his breakup with Adam McKay: “Adam was like, ‘I want to do this, and this, and this’; he wanted growth and a sphere of influence, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know, that sounds like a lot that I have to keep track of,’” says Ferrell, discussing the split publicly for the first time. “To me, the potential of seeing a billboard, and being like: ‘Oh, we’re producing that?’ I don’t know. … At the end of the day, we just have different amounts of bandwidth.”

Gloria Sanchez co-founder Jessica Elbaum has praised the actor and producer for just the opposite — his commitment to familiarizing himself with each project, the scripts and the people behind them. She also emphasized his propensity for bizarre humor, for making it possible for certain things to exist or happen just because he found them amusing as a concept: from bizarre beer commercials to a Broadway musical project about the Red Army Choir. Perhaps that explains his sudden appearance in late December, at a field hockey game, dressed as his character in Elf but with a cigar, a beer and an unshaven chin, outside the framework of any promotion. Asked there by a reporter what he was up to, he simply replied, “It’s been a rough holiday period.”

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