A bunch of ‘Wild West’ showoffs

Have you heard the one about the movie star who suddenly decided to put together a cross-country comedy tour? The stand-up comics would be seasoned but not nationally known, playing 2,000-seat venues when they were used to 30-seat houses. They’d go to Southern and Midwestern cities off the beaten (laugh) track. From conception to launch would be only six weeks. And they’d play 30 cities in 30 nights.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” says a smiling Vince Vaughn in a poolside room at the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica. He admits the tour, captured for the big screen in the upcoming road documentary “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland,” due to open Friday, was both impulsive and a labor of love. “I wasn’t thinking past the fact that this is going to be different and exciting and fun,” Vaughn offers. “The hard technical work fell on other people; they were the ones making the calls and doing stuff. But it was really a story of all of us pulling together and doing our parts.”

For years, Vaughn had been putting together one-off stand-up nights as benefits in cities where he was shooting movies. But packing four comics, production staff and a film crew into three buses and winding from Hollywood through Texas and Tennessee to Illinois was no laughing matter. So he surrounded himself with close associates, including his sister, Victoria, and best friend, Peter Billingsley, as producers, and longtime friend Ahmed Ahmed, who was instrumental in assembling the cast.

Ahmed says, “We were all having dinner at this steakhouse in Chicago when [Vince] was finishing ‘The Break-Up,’ and we were getting ready to do this benefit, and he said, ‘Why don’t we take this show on the road? What are you guys doing next month?’ ”

John Caparulo adds, “When Ahmed asked me, ‘Do you want to do a tour with Vince Vaughn across the country, 30 shows in 30 days?’ it’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to go to the Super Bowl?’ ‘Uh, yeah, all right.’ A month later, we’re on a bus. It was an insanely good opportunity.”

“The one thing I like about these guys who I saw through watching Ahmed is that they’re kind of telling true stories,” says Vaughn of Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco. “Somehow these guys being able to laugh at real stuff from their experience, maybe there was healing for the audience.”

With the whole cast crammed together for 30 days, though, first-time feature director Ari Sandel said he’d occasionally hear raised voices.

“Sometimes you’d walk on the bus and they’d be in a huge debate,” he said by phone from Los Angeles, “about who the best linebacker was . . . for like seven days. I’ve never seen people yell so much . . . it was insane.”

“We had high-class problems,” admits Egypt-born, America-raised comic Ahmed. “We were on a nice bus.”

“Ours was like a prison bus,” grumbles Billingsley.

“It was like a Bangkok prison,” agrees Ahmed.

Billingsley laughs and says, “You guys would run out of food and you’d send [Ahmed] out there at, like, 3 o’clock in the morning to try to get food from our bus.”

Ernst, whose comedy is the most physical of the group, says, “It was like some ‘Lord of the Flies’-type [stuff] because they would guard their things: ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘We don’t have any Yoo-Hoo.’ ‘You can’t have any Yoo-Hoo!’ ”

The film took shape around what Sandel called “the five minutes before and the five minutes after” the comics took the stage, revealing some of their techniques and insecurities. Sandel, Vaughn, Billingsley and the production team chiseled down 600 hours of footage.

“I’ve known Ahmed for eight years; I’ve seen his act a million times,” said Sandel. “But it wasn’t until I actually was on tour with him and interviewed him and saw him prepare -- for the first time, I really understood what it was he’d been doing the last eight years.”

“I was surprised every night,” adds Ahmed, whose material often concerns his experiences as an Arab American, including blatant racial profiling. “I try to make it self-deprecating so I’m not attacking the audience; it’s more making fun of myself. [Afterward] the guys would say, ‘You killed; you had a really good set!’ ”

Perhaps not surprisingly for a group of guys with such dynamic energy, chaos was always part of the plan.

“We’d change it up every night,” says Billingsley of a slate that would occasionally include guests such as Jon Favreau, Justin Long and “Wedding Crashers” costar Keir O’Donnell. “We’d have the four comics, and like, two acts in between. Vince would sing karaoke sometimes; he’d do a scene from ‘Swingers’ with an audience member.”

In one of the film’s more poignant sequences, the comics complain about their accommodations -- then come face-to-face with dozens of people displaced after Hurricane Katrina. But Vaughn shrugs off talk of traveling difficulties. Meeting people who had lost everything put the travails of a seat-of-the-pants comedy adventure in perspective.

“Both of my parents worked for a living, so I know what it’s like to have real pressure and real problems,” he scoffs. “Real pressure is having to feed my kids, ‘How am I going to make the mortgage?’ I benefited from having grandparents who were farmers and immigrants. So I was never like, ‘Oh, this is so hard.’ You’re on a bus going to make people laugh.”