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Comic Ron White's timing was just right |
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Written by Erin Podolsky, McClatchy-Tribune
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Thursday, 08 March 2007 |
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Ron White is much like the scotch that he loves to drink while performing: He's decidedly smoky in flavor, causes a slow burn in the mouth and shoots up in price as he ages.
At 50, the Texas comedian is 20 years into his stand-up career and six into the big-time fame that came calling when he, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy came together for the redneck comedy rodeo known as the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Success couldn't have come at a better time.
"I look like I'm 50. I feel like I'm 50. But I don't mind it. I was such a banshee when I was 40 and a bigger banshee when I was 30 that I'm lucky," White says. "If life was fair, I'd be dead. So, thank God, it's not."
It's been a good year for White. His most recent album, "You Can't Fix Stupid," has sold 296,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was nominated for a Grammy, along with the latest Blue Collar album, which was up for two comedy Grammys at once. (He jokes this makes him "the first comedian not to win a Grammy after being nominated for two Grammys in one year.")
But it's not the albums or the Comedy Central specials - and there have been a number of those, with another already in the works, as well as a role in an upcoming HBO series - that bring White happiness. He finds that only on a stage.
"I take it very seriously, and I still work very hard on my craft. I still go to open mic nights to try new stuff. I still watch tapes. I still do everything it takes," he says. "That's all that matters to me, the live performance. I don't care about records or movies or TV or anything."
In that sense, White is still the same performer he was before the Blue Collar Comedy Tour made him famous. But he can't help admitting that headlining a theater is sweeter than opening for somebody else, even one of your best friends.
"If you're opening for Jeff Foxworthy, no matter how good a job you do or how much that crowd likes you when you're onstage, they forget your name the second he walks out," White says. "Because they paid money to see him, and after they can go, 'That first guy was funny - what was his name?'"
His latest tour is named after "You Can't Fix Stupid," but White says most of the material is new.
"If people saw me last time two years ago, there will be nothing the same. There's actually very little of the show right now that's ever been recorded. There's really not very much of that record on it. So I think we're going to quit naming it and just say, 'Ron's here!'"
With a big house in suburban Atlanta that he likes to say his fans bought him, a luxe tour bus and garage full of fancy cars, does White ever worry that he'll lose his ability to communicate with the common man?
Not a chance, he says.
"I've always been a storyteller. I tell stories about what happens to me. I mean if my plane breaks down, I don't talk about that onstage because then it's like: 'Oh, did your plane break? You poor thing.' I go out there to make the crowd laugh as hard as I can possibly make them laugh with original material.
"That's really my only criteria. So it's mostly stuff they can relate to, or it's not going to make them laugh that hard. Because if I tell you about me, you'll laugh. But if I tell you about you, you'll really laugh." | Only registered users can write comments.
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