Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

In late summer 2005 – right after Wedding Crashers became a massive hit – Vince Vaughn hosted a 30-night traveling "Wild West Comedy Show" featuring himself, four of his lesser-known comedian friends, and a few guests.

If that sounds a little like Dane Cook’s Tourgasm, a limited-run show that aired on HBO a couple of years ago, it is...except it doesn’t suck.

The success of the Wild West Comedy Show is that it actually shows us the stand-up comedy, as opposed to Tourgasm, which showed us four neurotic jerks on a bus. They say every comedian is a bundle of neuroses, and this gets into the whole “living-on-a-bus-together” thing a little bit, but in small enough doses so that we still actually like everyone involved.

The first night of the tour, predictably, is one of the best; we’re treated to a hilarious skit between Vaughn, his Swingers co-star Jon Favreau, and his Dodgeball co-star Justin Long. Afterwards, it settles into more of a routine as we get to known a little about the four unknown comedians and watch their acts.

They’re all solid – I can’t say any of them hit it out of the park, but there’s a steady enough stream of laughs. Most of the humor is fairly routine male stand-up (meeting girls at clubs, watching porn with your friends) although a few of the bits are priceless; I especially liked the description of a typical roller-skating rink party. Vaughn, impressively, puts himself firmly in the background, appearing only as the emcee and, between shows, doing endless radio interviews to promote the tour.

The best part of the film is when the tour has to be re-routed at the last minute when Hurricanes Rita and Katrina both hit. The comics visit a campground housing some hurricane refuges and bus them all to one of the shows, and the glee a young boy shows over meeting Vaughn – this is, again, the same summer Wedding Crashers opened – is almost worth the price of admission alone.

Overall you get some decent stand-up acts with plenty of extra bonuses thanks to Vaughn and his friends, and by the end you even grow to care about the four comics personally – one from a lower-class family, one who was still working as a waiter, etc. It’s well-executed, well-paced, and reasonably entertaining.

Movie Grade: B+

Synopsis:

Produced by Vince Vaughn, the film follows Vaughn as he handpicks four up-and-coming comics and then leads them on a remarkable 30-city, 30-day, 30-show tour as tour creator and emcee. The film features footage from the tour's performances, as well as behind-the-scenes and