The Sunday Paper Staff Blog

By Bert Osborne
 
Equal parts road movie, behind-the-scenes documentary and live concert film, “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights, Hollywood to the Heartland” chronicles a whirlwind 2005 tour that took Vaughn (“Swingers,” “Wedding Crashers”) and a team of four comics (Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco) from Los Angeles to Chicago in near-record time. In the style of an Old West variety show, Vaughn plays host to the stand-ups, whose routines are interspersed with occasional sketches and musical performances by surprise guests like Jon Favreau, Dwight Yoakam and Peter Billingsley (the former “Christmas Story” child actor, also an executive producer of this movie).
 
Vaughn, 37, spoke about the project during a recent interview in Los Angeles.
 
Q How did you go about selecting which comics would be joining you on the tour?
 
A Well, in the case of Ahmed, I’d met him when he was an extra on a TV after-school special I was doing with Peter [Billingsley]. We were all sort of the same age, 20, 21. I remember having lunch with Ahmed one day, and when I got back to the set, Peter pulled me aside and said, “What are you doing? You’re not supposed to talk or go to lunch with the extras.” [He laughs.] The funny thing is, Ahmed lives with Peter now [laughs]. Anway, we all became good friends. There weren’t a lot of parts being written for Egyptian dudes, so Ahmed started doing stand-up as a way of expressing himself. I’d go watch him and he started getting really good, telling stories more about just being himself, more relatable kinds of things, based in reality. That got me thinking. There’s always something fun about people who are able to laugh at themselves, or at things that might seem too difficult to laugh about. For an audience, it’s kind of healing.
 
A lot of the comedy addresses and reflects these rather trying times we’re living in—post-9/11, with the war in Iraq, and specifically, in this movie, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
 
Yeah. That approach became very interesting to me, this idea about different styles. There’s no one right answer. There’s always more than one way to the waterfall … Comedy should be inclusive like that. Too many times, when things get tense, whether it’s a political issue, Katrina or Iraq, the comedy sort of becomes one-sided and almost acidic. Once you keep doing that, people stop hearing you. They start feeling defensive. They retreat, and it’s easier for them to categorize it and stop listening. I was always more a fan of somebody like Richard Pryor. He’d talk about some serious stuff, but he had a way that was warm and self-deprecating. His tone and approach opened me up to look at things differently than maybe I would’ve, to appreciate situations I wouldn’t have otherwise understood. With these comedians in our movie talking about themselves and their personal experiences, I don’t know, we just always had the sense that people left that show feeling tighter. There was an energy. You felt more open to the person next to you. The show had a very uniting effect, not a dividing one.
 
How did you initially come up with the idea for the tour?
 
It all started in New Orleans, way before any of the Katrina stuff happened. A friend of mine had a place down there, and it was a way for me to help draw some people to his club, to give them a good night of business, just for fun. Eventually, we started doing more shows for different benefits, like the Army Emergency Relief Fund, raising money for families unfortunate enough to have lost someone overseas. We’d gather together a few funny comics and just kind of improvise or whatever, and the response was always tremendous. People really loved the show.

While I was filming “The Break-Up,” we did another benefit show in Chicago, so I thought, why not go and play as many places as possible? For me, just selfishly, it was a different kind of thrill than you get shooting a scene in a movie, having a conversation with a live audience and really connecting with them, you know? At the time, I only had 30 days open in my schedule, so I planned one a night, not realizing that most people take a night or two off in between [laughs]. I don’t regret it, though. That was the whole point, to go to these places where they don’t usually get shows like this, giving them a chance to see something in their own backyard.
 
At what point in the planning stages did you decide to film it?
 
Can I just say, there’s such a fun sort of circus environment to the show, and what I love best about the movie is that the live atmosphere really translates well in what you see on the screen. I thought, why not bring some cameras and see what comes out of it? I didn’t know exactly what that was going to be, but when you end up going through 600 hours of footage from all these different shows, it’s almost like writing a screenplay. You have a good road movie, these great live stand-up pieces, interesting back stories about these guys and their families, the highs and lows of watching them have good nights and bad nights. The movie became so many more things than I expected it would at first [laughs].

Of course, I only came up with the idea. It was Peter and Victoria [Vaughn, his sister] who had to make it all come together in six weeks. That was the most daunting task—finding the buses, booking the 30 venues, getting all the camera equipment, convincing people that I really was coming to town, explaining to everybody what a Wild West Show was. Was I going to be roping horses, or what? [Laughs.]
 
Was there one stop on the tour that was the most meaningful or rewarding for you?
 
Well, the Katrina stuff hit me hard. I had a lot of friends in New Orleans. The first show I ever did was there. We were originally scheduled to play there, and when I first heard the news about the hurricane, I was insistent that we proceed as planned. That was before I realized the magnitude of what had happened, and that we weren’t going to be able to go. So we rerouted to Dallas, with a real awareness of what people were going through at the same time. We decided to make those Dallas shows tribute shows. They almost felt like more of a question-and-answer session than a comedy show. I think the film really depicts the momentum of that, scrambling around and how the situation changed our reality, giving us a different awareness of things. You ask yourself what you can do to be helpful … That’s something universal about people, I guess. At our best, whatever our differences, we come together. It’s just a shame that it takes such a horrible event to get us there. SP