A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show” demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.
Vaughn gathered some little-known comics (Ahmed Ahmed, Bret Ernst, John Caparulo, Sebastian Maniscalco) and his friends Peter Billingsley (the “A Christmas Story” kid, who has been buds with Vaughn since the two of them did an after-school special on the dangers of steroids) and Justin Long (Mac guy from the commercials) for a 30-day comedy tour of the sticks to see if anything would happen. If anything had, this movie would not have been on the shelf all this time.
On to the jokes. There’s an Arab guy who does everybody-thinks-I’m-a-
terrorist bits. There’s a self-described “Guido” who does Italian-American shtick. Backstage and on the tour bus, the guys whine, deliver astonishingly uninteresting self-analysis (“I’m a comedian. That’s what I do”) and confess to (well-justified) insecurities.
One comic’s brother was gay and died of AIDS – which supplies him with the idea of doing a bit about how gays like interior decorating. One performance leads a guy to come offstage in full hissy-fit mode to say of his own routine, “That was a six on a scale of one through 10,” substantially overrating himself.
The closest I came to laughing was at the end, when someone says – this comes, like everything the comics say about their careers, entirely without irony – “We did the impossible. Thirty days, 30 cities, 30 shows!” Yep, someone should name an airport after this crew. Considering one of them does a bit about waiting for the cable guy – I think we had a Mondale in ’84 bumper sticker on our car the first time I heard this routine – how about Hack International?
Only about 40 percent of the movie is even comedy; the rest consists of lots of shots of maps (because it really matters whether that joke was told in Indianapolis or Little Rock), interviews with Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens (!), look-at-us-we’re-travelin’ montages (cue Willie Nelson singing “Georgia on My Mind” on the soundtrack), a random comment from film director Taylor Hackford, news clips from CNN (because the tour came amid the 2005 hurricane season) and a shot of Long impishly placing boxes on the sleeping Billingsley. Somebody call the National Guard, it’s a laff riot.
VINCE VAUGHN’S WILD WEST COMEDY SHOW: 30 DAYS AND 30 NIGHTS – HOLLYWOOD TO THE HEARTLAND
Worse than open-mike night.
Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the E-Walk, the 19th Street, others.