Vaughn’s variety works well in ‘Wild West Comedy Show’

Not only will viewers get a look at the featured comics, we’ll also meet their folks.

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

Vince Vaughn is still “money.” More money than ever.

How money?

He can have people throw together a stand-up comedy concert tour, put four little-known to unknown stand-up comics in it, slap his name on the marquee and have it sell out all across the country.

He can get the guy who made the Oscar-winning short film “West Bank Story” to film the tour, onstage and off, make a movie out of it and a studio will put it in theaters.

Maybe Vaughn’s “Wild West Comedy Show” started as an act of altruism — Vince rounding up and anointing four stand-ups worthy of stardom by taking them on the road with him. Perhaps it was a personal test of endurance — 30 cities, 30 shows in 30 days. Can he still hack it? Or it could have been just a vanity project.

But “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” the over-titled comedy concert film built around Vaughn & Company’s fall 2005 romp from Hollywood to Chicago, became a revealing and often hilarious look at the stand-up’s life.

The four comedians, with Vince and assorted Vince pals, pile into an RV for a cross-country trip — kind of staged, no? But like Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian,” “Wild West” is a documentary that strips away the artifice to reveal the angry, insecure obsessives who try to “kill” for a living.

The movie gives these comics — Bret Ernst, an Italian-American not above the odd “Guido” joke; John Caparulo, a dumpy cross between Larry the Cable Guy and Dom Irrera; Ahmed Ahmed, the world’s only Egyptian-American comic; and Sebastian Maniscalco, who quit his waiter job to do the tour — plenty of stage time. It lets them gripe about the bus, the audiences, the hecklers.

And then we meet their parents, get to know how life offstage maybe hasn’t worked out. This one can’t get a date, that one can’t get a break — tragedies, hard childhoods, the works. And don’t get Ahmed started about what it’s like for an Egyptian American to fly these days.

“You guys take, an hour, two hours, to get on the plane? Takes me six weeks.”

They did this tour, rolling from Bakersfield to Nashville, Lubbock to Little Rock, right in the middle of the worst hurricane season in memory. Hurricane Rita caused cancellations. And the showbiz lads (excluding Vince) reluctantly visit a Katrina camp to give out tickets to a show. It’s also a reality check — people who really have it rough — punctuated by the most hilarious punchline in the movie. People know that gay artist brother from “Wedding Crashers” (Keir O’Donnell) everywhere.

Vaughn does sketches with his Hollywood pals, recreating a bit from “Dodgeball” with Justin Long, riffing with his “Swingers” buddy Jon Favreau, singing (terrified, scared witless) a duet of “Streets of Bakersfield” with Dwight Yoakam. In Bakersfield. The same day he meets Buck Owens. That’s pressure.

We see Vince coach the comics, give them pep talks, chat up his love of country music (they do a show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium) and visit old haunts (South Bend, where he was in “Rudy”). We get a taste of his loyalty to friends when we meet his pal Peter Billingsley and watch them goof on Peter’s piece of screen immortality (he was Ralphie in “A Christmas Story.” And we see why they’re friends. They recreate an “After School Special” on steroids they did in the ’80s.

It’s a boy-bonding movie about a mostly male profession, strictly a guy’s movable feast of killer routines (and some not so), quick-thinking comics (Caparulo is the quickest) and groupies.

The concept — re-introducing stand-up to a country that grew indifferent to it in the 1990s — is a winner.

And the material? A lot of physical shtick, a few too many “Didya ever notices” and a whole lot of “bits” not printable in a newspaper. But the laughs come, often fast and furious. And when they don’t, Vaughn is there to pick up the pieces with a ditsy “Hollywood” sketch and a pat on the back, backstage, that “You’ll get’ em next time.”