“Electric cars are gay,” says Vince Vaughn in an unfortunate attempt at humor in this trailer for Ron Howard’s new film, “The Dilemma.” It gets worse — Vaughn’s character continues, “not homosexual gay but, you know, ‘my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance’ gay.”

Given the recent outcry over bullying and last week’s suicide of a gay Rutgers student, this kind of thing isn’t funny — well, since we’re apparently splitting semantic hairs here, it’s funny as in “something’s off,” but not “ha-ha funny.”

Thus, Universal Studios has been compelled to remove the joke from its trailer, even though, as Gawker reported Friday, the studio says it prescreened the clip for targeted audiences. But Anderson Cooper wasn’t having it, as he told Ellen DeGeneres on her show Wednesday (see second clip below), and once the Coop caught on, it was a matter of time before Universal had to make changes. –KA

YouTube:

“Ellen” via YouTube:

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