Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show !

To remind yourself of stand-up comedy's mixture of aggression and vulnerability, observe comedian Sebastian Maniscalco as he insults the male population of San Diego during a show, near the beginning of the documentary Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show.First Maniscalco states that San Diego men favour effete drinks such as apple martinis. And then he sets them straight in the matter of choosing manly beverages: "You get beer or something that tastes like gasoline." Then he ridicules San Diego men for wearing flip-flops.

Offstage afterwards, he is clearly shaken. "Man did you see that?" he asks no one in particular. "Flip-flops. I did jokes on flip flops and the audience just turned on me." His fellow comedian, John Caparulo, commiserated with Maniscalco. "I can make fun of God," he said, in tones of wonderment, "but not flip-flops."Such rocky onstage moments are not seen again, however, in this documentary of a 2005 comedy tour featuring four performers – Maniscalco and Caparulo, plus Bret Ernst and Ahmed Ahmed – doing 30 shows in 30 days across the United States.

Director Ari Sandel, who made an Academy Award-winning short film, West Bank Story, with a comic take on Israeli-Palestinian relations, shows generous portions of each comedian's performance. Students of the art will be interested in the commentary the performers provide.Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed, who does a hilarious routine on his problems with airport security, frankly admits that he capitalizes on his ethnicity. Exploitation of this material requires courage and the breaking of unspoken taboos.

"Most Arabs don't think we have the right to tell jokes," Ahmed says. The parents of all four are interviewed near the end of the film, interviews that account for much of the bittersweet feeling of the movie. The cliché of comedy being born of misery is demonstrated by the familial woes these performers survived – poverty and the death of an older brother from AIDS in the case of Ernst, for example.