Vince Vaughn's Comedy Takes a 'Wild' Ride
Hollywood's funnyman on his latest film and comedy tour.
Feb. 11, 2008— -- He made us laugh while he crashed weddings of all shapes and sizes. He even managed to make us laugh while he and Jennifer Aniston broke up on the big screen. And with his latest mouthful of a film, "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights, Hollywood to the Heartland," Vaughn shows that once again, he has found an entirely new way to deliver laughs.
For his latest project, in theaters now, Vaughn set out with aspiring stand-ups Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco on a whirlwind 30-day swing of the country. Peter Travers caught up with Vaughn in an interview for ABC News NOW's "Popcorn" to find out how 600 hours of raw road-trip footage yielded the star's latest movie.
The "Wild West" star explains how he took an offbeat variety show started for local charities and transformed it into a fresh film idea: "The show always went over so well. I thought it would be great to try to go to as many places as possible."
Vaughn, notorious for his wild off-the-cuff humor, employed the same approach for this project: "We didn't know what we were doing other than these 30 places. We didn't have any master plan for what the film would be."
Vaughn jokes that the project became "really just about survival. What are we doing tonight? Where are we tonight? … And you're filming it as you go, but the focus is really to perform each show at each venue."
Channeling the old-school idea of the traveling Wild West variety show, Vaughn had to convince some skeptics. He jokes about the struggle he had selling the idea: "People are like 'Is Vince Vaughn going to show up and rope horses?'"
Himself a Midwestern native, Vaughn hoped to revive the old tradition of a traveling show that hits cities both large and small: "It used to be very commonplace that people would put together these variety comedy shows and travel." So for Vaughn, even though he admits he is not musically inclined, the "Vince Vaughn Wild West Comedy Show" was "really a play on words for the old Buffalo Bill's Wild West Comedy Show."
