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TV or Not TV?
For stand-up comic Bill Engvall, that is the question. But even if he never gets a sitcom of his own, he’ll always be at home on the road.
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On the plane Engvall explained that he got his first taste of stand-up as a student at Southwestern University in Georgetown in the early eighties, producing impromptu shows at a bar he managed. (Born in Galveston and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona, he got to Central Texas as a teenager when his father, a doctor with the Public Health Service, was transferred there.) His first opportunity to perform, however, didn’t come until 1984. While in the audience for an amateur night at Comedy Corner in Dallas, a friend persuaded him to go up and do five minutes. He did, and he so impressed the club’s manager that he was offered the job of emcee. One of his duties was to pick up visiting comics at the airport, and so it was that he came to meet and observe such top-drawer talents as Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, and Jay Leno. He worked at that club for two and a half years, and by the end of his run, he had started to take his own act on the road. In 1988, after a year of touring, Engvall wanted to break into acting, so he and Gail, then married for five years, moved to Los Angeles.
L.A. proved to be a tough nut to crack. The Engvalls rented a house that was beyond their means, and he began to look for acting work while continuing to play comedy clubs across the country. When he got his first television audition, an unpleasant reality set in. He brought the script home and enlisted Gail to help him with his first read-through. He recalled her telling him years later what she thought to herself at the time: “Oh, my God, he can’t act. We have chucked all our money into this, I’m pregnant, and he can’t act his way out of a paper bag.” After a few classes his acting improved, but he was still unable to break through. “I went on plenty of auditions,” he said, “and they seemed to like me, but I never got the part.” Eventually, he landed guest spots on Designing Women and the Golden Girls spinoff, Golden Palace, as well as a few spots doing stand-up on Leno’s Tonight Show, but nothing permanent.
Then, in 1992, everything suddenly seemed to click. Engvall won Male Stand-up Comic of the Year at the American Comedy Awards, and when Delta Burke left Designing Women for her own show, Delta, she cast him in a supporting role. But that show was canceled after just one season, sending Engvall back on tour, where he was shocked and dismayed to discover that he had plateaued. “I was reaching a point in the club circuit where I was becoming my own worst nightmare,” he said. “I had hit the wall. I was popular, but I was not moving up the ladder of success. On the contrary, everything was just spiraling downward. I didn’t like who I was, and I started drinking a lot: tequila, like nobody’s business. I went home one night crying to my wife thinking that I was an alcoholic. To look where I was going was to gaze into a very dark place. I was desperate for a change.”
At about this time, Jeff Foxworthy was beginning to hit big. A comrade-competitor for years on the club circuit, the Georgia native had a down-home charm that was appealing to country music audiences during the early nineties, when country was the hottest thing going. Engvall’s friendship with the budding superstar paid off. Although it took some convincing, he finally warmed to Foxworthy’s advice that he ditch his manager of nine years and sign with Foxworthy’s manager, J. P. Williams, a former agent with deep roots in comedy. “It turned my career around,” Engvall said. “The first thing J.P. told me was, ‘I want you to stop drinking onstage.’ I asked why, and he said, ‘It’s not professional. People don’t come to watch you drink.’” Williams also softened Engvall’s Western look, encouraging him to lose the big belt buckle, the cowboy boots, and the Stetson he wore onstage. “Comedy’s a visual thing,” says Williams. “With that big hat you could never see his facial expressions, which are the key to his comedy.” Williams also got Engvall to stop laughing at his own jokes and to clean up his act, which by that time had started to get racier. As soon as Engvall listened to his new manager, everything improved. “The transition has been amazing,” says Williams. “It’s good that Bill is open to suggestion.”
“Bill is so deserving of success,” says Foxworthy, “and he always had the talent. He just didn’t have the direction. When he got it, he started opening for me in big theaters, and very quickly it wasn’t fun following him onstage. I would tell him, ‘Bill, you don’t have to be that funny.’”
Perhaps the most important consequence of the Foxworthy-Williams connection was Engvall’s deal with Warner Bros. Nashville, the company that struck gold (and then some) with Foxworthy. Engvall’s debut, Here’s Your Sign, not only established him as a commercial draw but also embodied the perfection of a routine that, like Foxworthy’s trademark redneck shtick, would catch on and become his signature. The premise of the routine, in Engvall’s words, is, “Stupid people should have to wear a sign that says, ‘I’m stupid.’ That way, you wouldn’t rely on them. In fact, we carry those signs around, and we just go, ‘Here’s your sign.’” That setup is followed by (1) the rapid-fire description of a situation in which someone asks a stupid question; (2) a cutting rejoinder from Engvall; and (3) his kicker, a guttural “Here’s Your Sign.” Even Engvall is mystified by the routine’s success. “Here’s your sign, the title, is simple,” he says. “I mean, there have been smart-aleck answers to stupid questions since the beginning of time, but I just turned it into something.”
Whatever the reason, his particular brand of good-natured comedy plays well to fans of country music, who’ve always embraced stand-up and skit comedy. Country comedy is almost always family-oriented in subject matter and clean in delivery, qualities that Engvall and Foxworthy put at the center of their own acts. “I keep religion and politics out of it,” Engvall said. “There are very few people who can do an hour and half of clean material for a country audience, but Jeff and I are bringing it back to that.” Country audiences are returning the favor. Foxworthy’s four albums have sold a total of more than 9 million copies. As of early this year, Engvall’s Here’s Your Sign had sold more than 750,000 copies, according to Warner Bros. And Dorkfish, which was released not long after Jerry Seinfeld’s first album, took only four weeks to surpass it on the charts.
How important is the country audience to Engvall’s success? Here’s Your Sign languished in the stores until he cut a single of comic bits backed by country star Travis Tritt’s music. The single became a radio hit and, according to SoundScan, finished the year as the third-best-selling country single on the overall singles chart. Still, Engvall is anxious to avoid being pigeonholed. “Country fans are the most loyal fans in the world,” he says, “but the thing I like about my album is that it’s all over the place. It could be put on a rock station, or it could be put on easy-listening.”
After our small plane lands in Beaumont and Engvall steps out onto the tarmac and into a cab, the hard part of his day is over. All he has to do now is get to his hotel, nap, eat dinner, and go out and slay the audience.
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