WHEN you buy a ticket for a Vince Vaughn movie, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. The story of a sarcastic if affable guy, with a self-satisfied grin and immaculate sideburns, who wins over the guys and gals with his smart-aleck comebacks and learns a few life lessons along the way, possibly after finding true love or being barraged with dodgeballs. The kind of guy he inhabits so completely, in movies like “Wedding Crashers,”“Swingers” and “The Break-Up,” that he couldn’t possibly be anything but a nonchalant cynic in real life.
So it came as a surprise on a recent Sunday morning to find Mr. Vaughn, 37, sitting in the lounge of a Hollywood theater, choking back tears. The catalyst for his Hillary Clinton moment? He was recounting a trip he took in 2005, when he packed a tour bus full of young comedians on an ad hoc cross-country journey that would lead, among other places, to a trailer park for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Alabama and benefit concerts for Hurricane Rita victims in Texas.
“It was very hard for me,” Mr. Vaughn said, struggling to maintain his composure as he recalled the trip, “because it’s one of those situations where there’s no answer of how to solve it, but these lives are destroyed.”
“I’m not a politician,” he added. “I don’t have the answer to anything, but I do like to make people laugh. Can’t we all be on the same side with the stuff, versus having comedy that’s so acidic and meanspirited and dividing? That’s just not my nature.”
While it is only natural to be skeptical of any celebrity who supports a cause, Mr. Vaughn’s latest film, opening Friday, a documentary about his 2005 expedition titled “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” engenders a different kind of disbelief. It suggests that behind the acerbic satires and skirt-chasing farces, the show’s M.C. might have an earnest side too.

With little fanfare Mr. Vaughn has in recent years made occasional visits to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and organized comedy shows to benefit the Army Emergency Relief Fund. (Mr. Vaughn’s older sister Victoria was in the Army Reserve.)
In September 2005, following the release of “Wedding Crashers,” he decided on a more ambitious project: a tour that would travel from Los Angeles to Chicago, featuring stand-up comics he had discovered through the comedian Ahmed Ahmed, a friend he met on a 1990 after-school special.
“He was like, ‘What are you doing for the next month?’ ” Mr. Ahmed said, recalling his invitation to join the tour. “And I said: ‘Nothing. You’re the one with a career, remember?’ ”
Through visits to Los Angeles clubs like the Comedy Store, Mr. Vaughn rounded out the group with John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco. Their monologues mine personal material about decidedly middle-class experiences — fixing cars under the guidance of a stern father, shopping at Ross department stores — which plays to the widest variety of audiences.
Mr. Vaughn was capable of organizing the trip, but that doesn’t completely account for why he chose to take a colossal pay cut to spend a month introducing his “Wild West” ensemble, re-enacting the occasional scene from “Swingers” onstage and sleeping in the back of a tour bus.
Certainly, Mr. Vaughn acknowledged, the decision stemmed partly from the boredom he felt with his career at the time. “I could keep trying to do these same kind of comedies,” he said. “You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel.” (Sometimes, however, the audiences don’t flock to the theater, as this past holiday’s “Fred Claus” proved.)
Friends of Mr. Vaughn said the trip — with an itinerary that included stops in Oklahoma City; Nashville; Little Rock, Ark.; and Birmingham, Ala. — was also inspired by his desire to bring entertainment to places too often dismissed as flyover territory.
“He thought it was very important to take this on the old blue highways, before the interstate system passed all the towns by,” said Dwight Yoakam, the country musician and actor (who described his camaraderie with Mr. Vaughn as “probably one of the more disparate pairings” in the entertainment industry). “Vince really has an understanding of what goes on between Nevada and New Jersey, and he’s cognizant of the real world, versus the one we exist in, in our vacuum on either coast.”
It can be easy to forget that Mr. Vaughn was born in Minnesota and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Buffalo Grove and Oak Park. The son of a manufacturer’s representative for toys and video games and the grandson of a dairy farmer, he enjoyed an adolescence informed equally by the hip-hop of NWA and the country of Buck Owens.
Mr. Vaughn said his career and extracurricular choices were not reflections of a political stance. “I am truly more of an independent that anything,” he said. “I don’t agree 100 percent with either side on everything.”
If people feel strongly enough about an issue to act on it, he added, “I respect that, but that’s not my journey. My journey is to try to do stuff to make people laugh.”
It is that showman’s compulsion, friends say, that may explain the origins of Mr. Vaughn’s comedy tour. “He’s not an artist who sits alone with a typewriter; he’s a guy who works the room,” said the filmmaker and actor Jon Favreau, a “Swingers” co-star and longtime confidant, who appears in the documentary. “It’s all about being a carnival barker, and he loves the challenge of going into a new environment.”
The environment itself provided a substantial challenge over the course of the tour: Katrina touched down days before the inaugural performance, on Sept. 12, 2005, and several planned appearances along the Gulf Coast were canceled.
“I said, ‘I don’t care if there’s 50 people down there,’ ” Mr. Vaughn recalled with a sardonic laugh. “They’re like, ‘They’re evacuating the city.’ Oh, O.K.”
An additional show planned for Beaumont, Tex., had to be canceled when Hurricane Rita hit there. It was rescheduled in Dallas as a benefit matinee.
Meanwhile the comedians who joined Mr. Vaughn on the road discovered that the documentary form demanded a greater level of personal confession than their stand-up routines. Mr. Ernst talked about his gay brother, a frequent subject of his jokes, and his death from AIDS in 2001. During a stop in Las Vegas, Mr. Ahmed, a Muslim of Egyptian descent, revisited a jail where he was held on vague charges for 12 hours in 2004.
“We didn’t really know how much the documentary would focus on these guys’ personal lives until we went on tour,” said the film’s director, Ari Sandel, an Oscar winner for the short “West Bank Story” and a friend of Mr. Vaughn’s.
“It’s one thing to be friends with somebody and to ask them questions,” he added. “It’s a totally different thing to have a camera in front of them. After a while, you run out of a lot of typical questions after the first three or four days. Then the questions start to become a lot deeper.”
When the tour came to an end on Oct. 11, 2005, the comedians came home to the modest crowds and two-drink-minimum clubs they were accustomed to playing, returning with newfound confidence but also with uncertainty about how involved Mr. Vaughn would remain in their careers. “I don’t even know how to get hold of him,” Mr. Maniscalco said. “Talk to Vince? How? If I wanted to call him, he doesn’t even have a number.”
Mr. Vaughn had his own battles to fight: first with the Weinstein Company, which was to distribute the documentary until Mr. Vaughn became dissatisfied with a proposed advertising campaign and reclaimed the film.
“We all know when we see the posters that a studio can put up, like, ‘Get ready to laugh!’ ” Mr. Vaughn said, smirking while resting his chin on his fist. “Or ‘Here comes the funny!’ That makes me go, ‘Oh, God.’ ”
(In an e-mail message, the Weinstein Company’s Harvey Weinstein wrote, “The parting on ‘Wild West’ was very amicable and we wish the project the very best.” The movie is now being distributed by Picturehouse, the specialty division of New Line Cinema and HBO.)
Since Mr. Vaughn has finished the tour and the movie, there remains the question of how he should satisfy the restlessness that both projects were supposed to stave off. “The biggest challenge, when you’re at the point Vince is at, is finding something that piques your curiosity enough to engage you, because you could try your hand at anything,” Mr. Favreau said. “If he wanted to record an album as a singer, I’m sure he could figure out a way to do it. It’s just a matter of what he wants to do.”
For the time being Mr. Vaughn is talking about bringing his comedy tour to the Northeast and Northwest. And he is currently shooting another holiday-theme comedy, “Four Christmases,” in which he and Reese Witherspoon play a couple attempting to visit all four of their divorced parents and their spouses in a single holiday, and for which Mr. Vaughn will receive a producing credit.
While he may not be ready to swear off the disingenuous characters he so easily embodies, Mr. Vaughn is hopeful that the “Wild West Comedy” film will help reconnect him to his earlier sincerity and drive. Reflecting on his formative days as a professional actor, he said: “I was so excited if I got anything. I was 18 years old. I thought, ‘Man, I’m on “China Beach” for five lines.’ I thought that was awesome.”
As he looks at the field of younger talent coming up behind him, Mr. Vaughn said, he often encounters performers more interested in image than authenticity. “It seems like if you say you take an acting class, that’s not cool,” he said. He slipped into the whispery, dispassionate voice of the stereotypical pretty boy he says he never was: “I’m just a natural. I never studied.”
The documentary, he said, “is a counter to all of that. Who’s hot and who’s not? Who cares? Otherwise, we’d all be models remaking ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”
Da The New York Times, 3 febbraio 2008

È diventato uno dei nomi più famosi di Hollywood in fatto di comicità.
Vaughn di recente ha recitato nella commedia Fred Claus e ne è stato coproduttore, e questa ha rappresentato la sua terza collaborazione con il regista David Dobkin. Ha anche coscritto, prodotto ed è stato interprete della commedia di successo del 2006 The BreakUp, insieme a Jennifer Aniston. Il film alla sua uscita è stato numero uno al botteghino ed ha incassato complessivamente e in tutto il mondo 205 milioni di dollari.
The BreakUp è stato il primo film ad essere prodotto con il marchio della compagnia di produzione di Vaughn, la Wild West Picture Show Productions. Lo stesso anno, la Wild West Picture Show Productions ha prodotto Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights— Hollywood to the Heartland, che racconta la vita di Vaughn e di quattro comici quando recitano e quando non recitano, mentre attraversano il paese in tour su di un bus e recitando per 30 sere consecutive in 30 città.

Il film ha debuttato al Toronto Film Festival.
Nell’estate del 2005, Vaughn insieme a Owen Wilson, ha recitato nella commedia di grande successo di David Dobkin 2 single a nozze. Con incassi sul territorio nazionale pari ad oltre 209 milioni di dollari, il film rappresenta ad oggi la seconda commedia in termini di incassi classificata come R ed il settimo film in termini di incassi classificato come R.
Nel 2004, Vaughn ha recitato insieme a Ben Stiller nella commedia di successo Palle al balzo. Lo stesso anno, ha recitato anche nel film di Todd Phillips, Starsky e Hutch, con Stiller e Owen Wilson. Vaughn ha recitato anche nel film commedia di successo di Phillips, del 2003, Old School, insieme a Will Ferrell e Luke Wilson.
Inoltre, Vaughn ha recitato anche nel film di F. Gary Gray, Be Cool, con un cast di attori stellari tra cui John Travolta e Uma Thurman; nel film d’azione di Doug Liman del 2005 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, con Brad Pitt e Angelina Jolie; e nel film indipendente Thumbsucker il succhiapollice, insieme a Keanu Reeves e Vincent D’Onofrio.
Originario di Chicago, Vaughn ha attirato per la prima volta l’attenzione della critica e del pubblico nel film cult indipendente di Doug Liman del 1996, che ha avuto un successo inatteso, Swingers. Nel 2001, Vaughn ha lavorato nuovamente con lo sceneggiatore di Swingers e con l’attore coprotagonista Jon Favreau nel filmcommedia classico Due imbroglioni a New York, del quale Vaughn è stato anche produttore. Gli altri film in cui ha lavorato comprendono Unico testimone, The CellLa cellula, Psycho, The Prime Gig, il film di David Dobkin Il sapore del sangue, Il tempo di decidere, Il mio campione, Le locuste e il film di Steven Spielberg Il mondo perduto: Jurassic Park 2. Vaughn è stato ammirato lo scorso autunno nell’acclamato film di Sean Penn Into the Wild, adattamento del bestseller di Jon Krakauer.
Con il marchio della sua compagnia, la Wild West Picture Show Productions, Vaughn ha diversi progetti in fase di sviluppo, tra cui Male Doula, una commedia concettuale scritta da Dana Fox e tratta da un’idea di Vaughn; e Realtors, una satira basata sulla rivalità tra agenti immobiliari nel duro mercato degli immobili residenziali.
Attualmente sta lavorando alla produzione della commedia Couples Retreat, scritta da Jon Favreau nella quale reciteranno Vaughn e Favreau, con la regia di Peter Billingsley: è la storia di una coppia che decide di appartarsi al fine di dare un nuovo stimolo al proprio rapporto.