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Larry the Cable Guy: I just gotta be me |
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Written by Dan England
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Friday, 28 September 2007 |
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 Probably the only criticism that ever bothers Dan Whitney—the knock on him, as he puts it—is that he’s a fake.
Critics point to those early clips of Whitney’s act when he first went into comedy. He’s just a comic! He’s not a characater. He’s not, as he is now, Larry the Cable Guy!
Well, he’s gotta be honest wit ya, as he said 15 times during his 15-minute phone interview. Larry the Cable Guy is not an act. That’s just who he is.
“They seem to think I grew up in an apartment in the city, and I’m making all this up,” Whitney said. “That’s not the case. Obviously, I had to live that life in order to talk about what I talk about. That attitude and how I dress? I’m not faking that. That’s how I dress all the time.”
It’s worked well. He originally trademarked “Git-R-Done” to sell a few T-shirts. Now he tours nationally and has appeared in several movies, including “Delta Farce,” “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” and the upcoming “Witless Protection.”
He was also part of the quartet of comedians that made up the popular “Blue Collar Comedy Tour.” (The other three were Jeff Foxworthy, he of “You might be a redneck if...” and “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” fame; Bill Engvall, who has his own sitcom on TBS; and Ron White.)
Whitney’s background is about what you might expect Larry the Cable Guy’s to be, including the accent. He grew up on a pig farm in southeast Nebraska and moved to Florida when he was 16 (not the sandy beaches and Mickey Mouse part of Florida either). His jokes as a comic, pre Larry the Cable Guy, weren’t much different from the jokes he tells as his alter ego. In fact, he considers himself an old-school comic. He worships Steve Martin and tells one-liners.
“That’s really all my act is,” Whitney said. “There’s not a lot of joke-tellers out there anymore, and I’m proud to be keeping up the tradition.”
His act wasn’t really working in the early 90s, but neither were most acts. Comedy clubs were dying out, and far too many stations were showcasing stand-up comics. Cable TV was stuffed with it: In an episode of “The Simpsons,” an episode that ran in the early 90s, Homer gets cable for the first time, and one of the first shows he turns to is a show featuring a stand-up comic.
“It was way oversaturated,” Whitney said. “Unless you could sell tickets, you weren’t going to go far doing comedy. But I had a secret weapon.”
The weapon, of course, was turning his three-minute bit about a cable installer into a popular radio spot. His only payment for calling into the stations and acting as the cable guy, whom Whitney called “Larry” after his middle name, was a promise to promote his show. When he came into town, people knew him from those bits, so he billed himself as Larry the Cable Guy.
“It was just something to do,” he said, “and it got to be popular. Honestly, if I thought this was going to turn out the way it did, I probably would have kept my name.”
Sure, he turned up the accent and exaggerated some of the situations, but he told the same jokes, only this time with a twang, and it took off.
Whitney has since stretched his role, but don’t expect him to showcase the range of Tom Hanks. He took off the accent a little bit in “Delta Farce” and had a few serious parts near the end of the movie. And in “Cars” — the animated mega hit and by far the most successful picture he’s appeared in — he played Mater, probably the most loved and funniest characters in the movie. In fact, Mater was supposed to be just a bit character until the Pixar officials loved what Whitney was doing with the role and expanded him into a main character. Even then, Whitney just changed his voice a bit.
“That was one of the funniest things I ever did,” Whitney said, perhaps as proof that he even talks like Larry the Cable Guy. “I love to be in Wal-Mart and passing kids, and someone will say, ‘Look, there’s Mater,’ and they’ll look at me funny until I say, ‘Morning Sunshine!’ and that perks them up a little bit.”
Whitney doesn’t want to stray too far from being Larry the Cable Guy. He’ll be Larry in the new movie, “Witless Protection,” when it’s released in 2008. He heard from a lot of his fans who said they liked his “Health Inspector” movie the best simply because he was Larry the Cable Guy and not the guy at the end of “Delta Farce.”
“I always feel if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Whitney said. “I don’t take myself that seriously, I enjoy what I do, and as long as I’m making my fans laugh, I’m just going to do what I’m going to do.
“That’s what I kept hearing about ‘Health Inspector,’ that they liked that movie the best. And that was just me being me.”
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TO GO TO THE SHOW
• Larry the Cable Guy
• 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 5
• Budweiser Events Center in Loveland
• Tickets are $46.75 with additional fees and are available at the Budweiser Events Center Box Office, ComcastTix.com, Fort Fun in Fort Collins, Ikon Center in Cheyenne, Woody’s Newsstand and Cafe in Greeley or by calling 877.544.8499.
• For more information, go to www.larrythecableguy.com. | Only registered users can write comments.
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