Vince Vaughn's comedy concert pic reviewed

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on February 6th, 2008

Get ready for the onslaught of (negative) reviews of Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, the theatrical release starring Vince Vaughn, Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco! Not all of them will be negative, of course. But, even the positive ones will have backhanded compliments and the reviewers won’t be able to help themselves from making ghastly comments. They’re ingrained prejudice against comedians will ooze out through the cracks of their assessments.

Take this piece of gar-BAZH from Ann Lewinson, writing for the Fairfield Weekly, which, we assume, is an alterna-rag that covers Connecticut’s Fairfield County, weakly. We haven’t seen the film yet. But we wouldn’t be surprised if Lewinson cranked out some of the paragraphs before having seen it, so palpable is her distaste for modern standup.

As comedian Bret Ernst observes at the beginning of the film, stand-up isn’t what it was in the ’80s. Then the comics on this tour would have had their own sitcoms, but now “we’re in headliner purgatory.” Perhaps that’s because the public has tired of jokes about how women are this way and men are that. The upside of the elimination of meals of flights means there are no more jokes about airline food, but they’ve merely been replaced by jokes about airport security.

Ernst’s assessment of the current state of standup is questionable, but Lewinson’s grouchy and ludicrous conclusion is evidence of someone who just hasn’t done her homework. She’s come to the keyboard armed with a set of tired cliches and fifty-cent words from her (no doubt recent) comparitive lit class at Fairfield Community College and the resultant review is a waste of her time and the reader’s.

…Scratching the surface of frat-boy culture, it finds narcissism, insecurity and an almost paralyzing fear of anything that does not fit within its discourse of trite observation and bourgeois complaint. Now if Vince Vaughn can just channel that into his comedies, he might really have something

Read the rest here if you absolutely have to.

We’re going to try to score a review copy– if for no other reason than to see the footage of Buck Owens shortly before his death. (The Male Half received the spectacular “Dwight Sings Buck” CD for Christmas and it was in constant play at SHECKYmagazine HQ before we embarked on our current road trip!)

P.S. Note to Lewinson: That’s “Yoakam,” not “Yoakum.”

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