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Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights—Hollywood to the Heartland

You know how most DVDs come with extra features about the making of movie, interviews with the stars and the director, and whatever else was captured on film that fans might find moderately interesting? They seem to have got it backward here. What has been sent to theaters under the exhausting title Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights—Hollywood to the Heartland is the record of a tour the actor put together in 2005. The idea was to expose four up-and-coming standup comedians (one of whom, Ahmed Ahmed, is an old friend of Vaughn’s) to bigger audiences than they were used to. Vaughn hosted the shows and did improvised comic bits between the monologues, aided by occasional appearances by friends like Jon Favreau, Dwight Yoakam, Justin Long and Keir O’Donnell. In order to take advantage of Vaughn’s limited availability, and to give the tour some stunt value, they booked 30 shows in 30 cities over 30 nights. The comics are funny enough, depending on your preferences: John Caparulo was a little crude for my tastes (I’m not surprised to see that he went on to tour with “Blue Collar Comedy: The Next Generation”), but the others effectively mine their personal experiences for humor, from Ahmed’s experiences as an Egyptian American to Bret Ernst’s Italian neighborhood riffs. But the movie, which runs a not insubstantial 100 minutes, only gives us brief bursts of performance. Most of it is background: the guys on the tour bus, getting ready to go on stage, critiquing themselves after the finish, visiting their families and telling us how supportive they’ve been. There’s tourist footage as the bus rolls across middle America, and a visit with the late Buck Owens in Bakersfield. Those of you who watched A Christmas Story more than once over the holidays may be amused to see Peter Billingsley, the actor who played Ralphie, re-enacting a scene from the “Schoolbreak Special” on which he and a 19-year-old Vaughn first met. (Or you may be horrified to see how cranky he is if you wake him up in the middle of the night.) I would advise waiting for the DVD to come out: Hopefully they’ll pad all this out with some actual comedy.