The day after North Shore-raised Vince Vaughn returned from entertaining the troops in Iraq, he began another risky road trip.
The 37-year-old comic actor had no experience in the raw world of live stand-up, but he ventured into the American heartland as the traveling impresario to four up-and-coming comedians, putting on a show in a new town every day for a month and making a movie about it.

It was a tricky proposition. Producer Vaughn believed the four comics were funny, but as any traveler knows about the open highway, fate can undo the best of plans.Mother Nature almost did. The one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005 detoured their bus ride through the Deep South, but the diversion led them to a camp of evacuees living out of their RVs, a tragicomic encounter incorporated into the movie.

Vaughn’s vision for the film was ambitious, with some uncertainty: Create a film that mixes road trip, live bits before diverse audiences, documentary moments backstage and a crapshoot for an emotional arc (eventually provided by comic Sebastian Maniscalco, who was raised in Arlington Heights where his parents continue to live).

“Part of the thrill is that you don’t know exactly what it’s going to be,” Vaughn said.

The Vaughn standard

If audiences in the film are any indication, the foursome and their host deliver plenty in “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” which opens this weekend. The other funnymen are Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo and Bret Ernst. Also featured are Jon Favreau, Peter Billingsley and Keir O’Donnell.

The four jesters find humor in personal experience without being self-indulgent — the Vaughn standard.

“I wanted to give these guys a chance to be seen by people,” he said.

“It makes me respect them more that they had some humility — versus being like so, ‘Ah! This matters more than anything and it’s so profound that no one understands me.’ They would have stuff that’s extremely painful, and their point of view is that everyone understands me, and I’m not the only one, and there is something funny about it.”

For example, Ahmed’s story includes his coming of age as an Arab-American (his family left Egypt a month after his birth) in the post-9/11 era. He was even wrongly jailed in Las Vegas where an inmate thought he was a terrorist who could blast their way free.

Raised in Buffalo Grove and Lake Forest and now a resident of North Michigan Avenue, Vaughn contends his latest work is as provocative as was his “Dodgeball” (few thought the grade-school game was worthy of a full-blown feature), “Wedding Crashers” (one of the first R-rated blockbuster comedies in years), and “The Break-Up” (a romance in which the boy and girl don’t end up together).

“Every one of them, including ‘Wild West’ in its own way, are all kind of pioneering and different than what was existing prior to it,” Vaughn said.

The latest movie, he said, is a revival of “a traveling comedy variety show.”

Not that the actor is reinventing himself, though he likens his master-of-ceremonies role to a modern-day Buffalo Bill bringing an itinerant show to provinces bypassed by the big acts of New York and Los Angeles.

“I wish I had a master plan, but I don’t,” he said. “The arts are meant to be childlike. They’re a place of imagination. Whatever seems interesting or fun to me, I try to go and work hard at and do my best.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the 6-foot-5 performer has visited Afghanistan once and Iraq twice, including Baghdad, Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, to show American soldiers his then-new flicks “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.”

“A lot of them already had the movies on bootleg DVDs,” Vaughn said. “The troops … start asking me to sign their DVD copies. … I’m like, what’s going on?

“They sell these down at the black-market huts and you can buy them. This is crazy. What they are, someone in America films them on a video camera, and so there’s someone’s head in the way, so they’re not even good copies.”

The last stop in “Wild West” is the Vic Theatre in the North Side’s Lakeview neighborhood, just a few miles from Vaughn’s condo.

At home in Midwest

It’s a fitting ending because Vaughn calls the Midwest home.

While growing up in the north suburbs, he used to drive to Chicago for acting classes and even boxed at Portage Park – “just to stay in shape, just to learn, just for fun, nothing serious. I never fought in any tournaments,” he said. Today, he still has an Illinois driver’s license and likes to participate in Chicago Public Schools‘ Principal for a Day, where the “kids blew me away,” he said.

“The other big thing for me is to have a sense of humor about yourself. I think that is a Midwestern quality too — to be able to not take yourself seriously,” Vaughn said. “That has always served me well in life.”

As Vaughn riffed on those values, he was sitting in an office of his production company, where his older sister Victoria is one of the executive producers on “Wild West.” An energetic talker, Vaughn was staring in the direction of a framed poster for “The Break-Up” featuring the studio photo of Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in bed, estranged.

But he didn’t want to talk about the co-star, his former girlfriend. “I thought this was the Tribune, not Star magazine,” he cracked.

Tags: actor, anistion, bags under eyes, comedy, party boys, party to hard, vaughn, Vince Vaughn crashes the stand-up circuit, wedding crashers

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