Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show - Out tomorrow (********8/10)
Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show comes out June 3rd from Alliance Films, and is a must-watch for any aspiring stand-up comedian. Not only that, it’s a should-watch for the rest of us. Although Vince Vaughn has never been known as a stand-up comedian, he clearly loves the art, and decided to take four stand-up guys (no pun intended) on a 30-day, 30-city tour of
America. Comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Brett Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco form the bulk of the nightly show, and Vaughn hosts with the help of some surprise guests each night. And although some of the guests are not exactly surprises (like Jon Favreau), others truly are (like Dwight Yoakam). Each of the guest stars does a little skit with Vaughn on stage, and some are terrific.
One of the best bits in the movie involves Favreau and Vaughn and Justin Long (Live Free or Die Hard, and the Apple-vs-Mac commercials). Favreau of course famously wrote Swingers, which launched him (and to a lesser extent Ron Livingston) to stardom, and Vaughn to superstardom. In Swingers, just in case you’re a guy and somehow, amazingly, have not seen Swingers, Vaughn was the man. The ultimate cool guy, the one character in a movie that every dude wanted to be. Every guy wants to be one of two characters. Either John Wayne in
Rio Bravo, or Vince Vaughn in Swingers. Sometimes both. Anyway, Favreau decides to prove how easy it would have been for anyone else in the world to play that same character, and he gets Long to read the lines, right there on stage. Long’s impersonation of Vaughn in Swingers is, to quote a phrase, “money”. It ranks up there with either Kevin Pollack or Jay Mohr doing Christopher Walken. Considering it was off-the-cuff and spontaneous, it’s fantastic.
But for the most part, this film is about comedy, and the four main guys who do the tour. It’s not just joke after joke, although their on-stage acts are filmed and we get to see an awful lot of that. But we also get to see behind the scenes, on the tour bus with five guys living in close quarters for a month. And we get to see comedians and their real reactions when they bomb, when they get heckled, how sensitive and paranoid and insecure some of them really are. We also get to see them with their parents, and we understand how accepting parents must be of a career choice like “comedian”. (Especially Ahmed Ahmed’s Muslim mother and father, who were initially the least supportive of his career choice, but now are the funniest parents on the tour.)
The tour was taking place in the middle of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, and had to be bumped and rescheduled and moved around to accommodate the victims of that disaster. The guys tour a trailer park that is housing displaced families, and brings the hurricane evacuees out to see the show. There is a lot more going on in this film than just a bunch of jokes and inane behaviour on a tour bus, and that’s a good thing. It’s far better and more interesting to see these guys for who they are, to hear their real thoughts, than it would be to just see an hour and a half of standup from a tour. That being said, however, I was hoping for more of the standup comedy itself on the special features. I wanted to see the full show of these guys, especially John Caparulo, who I found very funny. And although there are a few extra skits and a little more comedy buried in the special features, the entire shows aren’t there.
A minor complaint, however, since the film itself was not designed to be simply comedic, and works extremely well. This is a very entertaining, informative, interesting and of course funny show, a funny and captivating group of guys, and a fascinating film experience. Whether you’re a stand-up fan or not, a Vince Vaughn fan or not, or a documentary buff or not, pick this up. It’s worth it on a lot of levels.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Vince Vaughn and John Favreau in particular seem to make a good team