Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show
In the documentary “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show,” a sorority girl tells the camera that she and her sisters are planning to see Vaughn’s traveling comedy-variety act because they like Vaughn and assume he has good taste. This dreadful, endless 90-minute movie proves how wrong she is. I like Vaughn too. He’s a good, underrated actor, and in interviews he’s a funny and engaging guy — a genuine raconteur. And he comes off pretty well in the movie — hardworking and generous, with diverse interests. But his taste in standup comedians is appalling. To accompany him on a 30-day bus tour, with performances in a different city every night, he picks four hack-meathead Dane Cook wannabes who tell jokes about tits and blowjobs. They include: A musclebound, unreconstructed caveman (Bret Ernst); a preening, sour metrosexual (Sebastian Maniscalco); a pasty, whiny slob (John Caparulo); and the “ethnic” guy (his words) who makes mildly funny observations about being an Arab in post-9/11 America (Ahmed Ahmed). Backstage, they treat us to banalities about life on the road and the uneasy relationship between comics and audiences. Mull over this insightful nugget, from Ernst: “I’m a comedian, man. This is what I do. I’m a comedian.” He’s one of those deadly-earnest comics who never says or does a single funny thing when he’s not performing and isn’t much better onstage. Caparulo insists that comedians start out as the funny guy among their group of friends; Ernst proves the exception. Maniscalco is little different; he displays a toxic personality both onstage and off. Little appears to interest him beyond personal hygiene and his workout routine. Caparulo and Ahmed, while uninspired, at least show hints of humility and self-awareness.
The movie is so shabbily photographed it sometimes looks like cellphone camera footage. It meanders aimlessly, eliciting groans every time director Ari Sandel returns to an Indiana Jones-style map that tracks the bus’s progress to each and every one of the 30 cities. (The bus gets to Detroit, stops, then moves on with no cutaway from the relentless Map of Tedium; I guess nothing interesting happened there!) Given that this tour occurred in the late summer of 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — a few of the shows became benefits for victims of the storm — it’s obvious the movie sat on the shelf for a while.
The only genuinely amusing revelation in “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show” is that Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie in “A Christmas Story,” has been Vaughn’s best friend after they played best friends in an after-school special about steroids (Billingsley was the juicer). In the movie’s lone inspired bit, Vaughn and Billingsley recreate the special, with its stilted, pedantic dialogue, as faithfully as they can, then show the audience a clip of the original. Billingsley, the movie’s producer, still has that adorable, round baby face. Otherwise, “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show” can’t even match the tired Friday night standup acts on Comedy Central for entertainment value — plus it costs more and you can’t change the channel. Not to mention that Comedy Central already did the comics-on-tour documentary thing — and did it well — with Patton Oswalt’s “The Comedians of Comedy.”