Vince Vaughn's first big movie role cast him as a guy who wanted to be Dean Martin, after which he made a string of movies in which he sometimes seemed to be trying to turn into Bill Murray. Who knew that all this time, he was actually shooting for Bob Hope? It seems that Vaughn, who has friends in the stand-up business who he's known since his days as a struggling actor, has long been in the habit of organizing stand-up benefit concerts wherever he happened to be filming movies. Then, a couple of years ago, Vaughn suggested that he and his stand-up buddies — Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco — load up a few buses, head out to the South and the Midwest where live comedy is scarce, and play thirty cities in thirty days. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," Vaughn says. The results can be seen in the new concert documentary Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights, which opens this weekend. Bob Hope comes to mind because there's something about the way Vaughan talks about the project that casts it all in a USO-tour, bringing-laughter-to-the-troops sort of frame. Indeed, as Dave Itzkoff notes in The New York Times, "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." (Vaughn's sister Victoria is an Army Reservist who was on the bus for the month-long tour.) The movie doesn't stray into any war zones, but at one point the comics do encounter displaced Katrina refugees. As for the comedy itself, it may not be cutting-edge satirical, but Vaughn's own taste is blue-collar populist. "I’m not a politician,” he says. “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.” Whatever the audience, Vaughn clearly sees such projects as his way of giving something back. "Both of my parents worked for a living, so I know what it's like to have real pressure and real problems."