Film

Those either tongue-tied by the contorted title of this concert doc or turned off by the fratboy antics promoted in its trailer can be forgiven for dismissing VVWWCS: 30D&30N—HTTH as a second-rate, stand-up version of Swingers—or as a big-screen rip-off of HBO’s short-lived, critically panned Dane Cook series, Tourgasm. But the raucous promotion belies a welcome, sweet-natured road trip that happily and willfully exploits Vince Vaughn’s marquee value to showcase a quartet of very deserving upstart comedians.

Any bait-and-switch resentment will dissipate once the featured players (Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco) take the spotlight and deliver the funny. Ethnic humor, observational humor, familial humor—all of them base their jokes on their own experiences, and talk offstage about how comedy has shaped their lives for better or worse in ways that are disarmingly engaging.

Vaughn doesn’t shy away from the camera, but his appearances are more sober than scene-stealing in his role as elder statesman and tireless promoter. And the fact that his barnstorming yukfest favors kid-sister cities like Lubbock, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, only reinforces Vaughn’s Chicago street cred as a Midwesterner first and a Hollywood tastemaker second.