Talk about performance anxiety: 30 gigs in 30 towns in 30 days. For four young stand-up comics, "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" would be a kind of 5,000-mile audition.

Channeling Buffalo Bill, Vaughn wanted to resurrect something like the format of old-time traveling variety shows. "Hollywood to the Heartland" was the motto. The troupe would play hinterlands venues rarely graced by a big-time live act: Bakersfield, Tucson, Lubbock, El Paso, Oklahoma City, Little Rock ...

It reads like a Greyhound schedule, and felt like one. Vince and his quartet traveled by bus the whole way. All four hailed from Los Angeles' Comedy Store and were pals beforehand:

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'Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Vince Vaughn, Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco.
• Rating: R for pervasive language and sexual humor.
• Web site: wildwestcomedy.com

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• Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed, specializing in ethnic stereotypes, is one of precious few Arab comedians. "This girl says to me, 'Make me your Egyptian princess!' So I said OK, threw a sheet over her head and told her to keep quiet."

• Blue-collar Ohio boy John Caparulo invariably wears a white T-shirt and red baseball cap and is infamous for his trademark foul mouth. No one who's shy about the f-word need catch his act (or, for that matter, this movie).

• Blue-eyed "Italian alpha male" Bret Ernst is the coolest and funniest of the lot, acting out the difference between drunken men and drunken women. His roller-skate miming is truly artful.

• Snappy dresser-and-groomer Sebastian Maniscalco begins his baths with "a full-body pre-soak" and takes his sheets to the dry cleaners. His deliberate pace and slightly seething attitude are a hip variation on Jack Benny's slow-burn.

Don't look for many yuks from Vaughn himself. The star of "Wedding Crashers," "Fred Claus" and "Swingers" just plays the role of emcee (and backstage shrink) here, although one of the film's best moments is a clip of Vaughn and pal Peter Billingsley at age 19 in a CBS "Schoolbreak Special" about a kid who joins the track team to impress girls and succumbs to -- steroids!

A few celebrity and musical guests show up, including the late Buck Owens (he wasn't "late" at the time) and country-western icon Dwight Yokum. But mostly, it's the four guys and their routines, for better or worse.

Behind the scenes, we get a good dose of their foibles, neuroses and theatrical as well as psychological issues. Theirs is, if nothing else, a very cathartic profession for processing your insecurities. But it's all a bit too biographical, lingering long over their struggles and with their parents, and watching them "grow" in the trade.

Director Ari Sandel (who made last year's hilarious Oscar-winning short subject, "West Bank Story") does a serviceable job in this, his feature debut. He "gets lucky" with some Hurricane Rita and Katrina action that prompts an ad-hoc benefit show for 200 survivors in an Alabama campground.

Vaughn is sometimes charismatic. He and the four comics are all surprisingly nice -- but only intermittently funny. Ditto, this road-show doc. When standups don't get their 15 minutes of validation, they're suicidal.

Yes, of course, they dread going back to wait tables. But that doesn't quite put them on a par with Helen Keller in the Hurdles Department.