Ron White Gets the Last Laugh
Did you hear the one about the high school screwup who got kicked out of the Navy, went to rehab, and ended up in Arlington selling storm windows from the back of his pickup? That’s when he met an unknown comic named Jeff Foxworthy*—and became the funniest man in America. (*Actually, he almost killed Jeff Foxworthy, but that’s another story.)
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His stories are typically pulled from that life. The 49-year-old White became Tater Salad during a brief stint in the Navy as a teenager, when his dedication to the dish turned it into his nickname. A few years later he returned to his birthplace of Fritch—a tiny Texas town about sixty miles from where our panhandle abuts Oklahoma’s—and got thrown in jail for disturbing the peace. During booking, the arresting officer, whom White had known since they were kids, sternly asked if he had any aliases. “Yeah,” White responded with a smirk. “They call me Tater Salad.” When White was arrested in New York ten years later, an officer found his name in a criminal database and asked, “Are you also known as Tater Salad?” as if White might have been the Fritch equivalent of the Son of Sam serial killer. It was one more imposition of real-world lunacy into Ron White’s sense of normalcy, and he turned it into his most popular bit. Now fans who don’t know how much he detests comments from the crowd yell “Tater Salad” at shows as if it were “Free Bird.”
Creating a routine full of such autobiographical bits might not seem difficult—until White explains it. “My audience has no idea what I’m doing to them,” White said on the afternoon of the show, his bloodshot blue eyes straining at a television showing the PGA Championship in the lounge of his tour bus. “It sounds like it’s just somebody talking, but it’s intricate comedy. Every drag of a cigar, every drink of Scotch, is there for a reason. I bounce laughs off of laughs off of laughs. I’ll start here with you”—he holds up a fairly steady hand—“and I’ll just bounce you higher and higher until eventually you’re choking.”
Sitting in the otherwise cool comfort of his luxurious rolling home, recently reappointed by his interior designer wife, Barbara, with faux-alligator seat covers and a plasma TV, the previous night’s toll on White was apparent. Framed by the tall collar of a white dress shirt, his face glowed pink and red, like a slice of spiked watermelon. His hair, light brown with blond highlights, looked as if he’d gone to bed with it wet—or maybe sweated a lot while he was sleeping—and his voice contained an extra measure of its customary gravel and cynicism.
“You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh,” he said. “It’s that difficult to do. And people who are supposed to do it—Lewis Black, Colin Quinn, Dave Attell, Mitch Hedberg, Bill Hicks—are the ones who do. If you’re not supposed to do it, I can tell.”
In defense of the rest of us, it took White a little time to see it in himself. When he was six, his family moved from Fritch to Deer Park, just outside Houston, and about that time he found his first love, comedy records. “I loved listening to laughter even as a little kid,” he said, momentarily brightening. “The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith’s ‘What It Was, Was Football.’ I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn’t know what any of it meant.”
But his second great love, discovered in his teens, was getting high, and comedy wasn’t so much something to do when growing up as a way to avoid doing just that. “I didn’t fit in exactly with any particular group in high school,” he said. “But I was funny, so the jocks tolerated me and the freaks gave me pot.” He got kicked out of school in the eleventh grade, in 1973, and soon joined the Navy, a last resort for a lot of kids wanting to clean themselves up. “I actually perfected my drug problem in the Navy. I was into anything you could ingest in any way—hallucinogens, opiates. I had a nasty, nasty problem.”
At the Navy’s insistence he left the service and enrolled in a Houston drug abuse program. Once clean, he started counseling for the program and soon became its primary speaker in the area. “I’d go to high schools and talk about my life,” he said, “and it just got funnier and funnier, until finally the people at the program were saying, ‘We don’t think drug addiction should be this funny.’ I said, ‘Well, okay, you tell them your story then. Let’s see where that gets you.’”
The next ten years or so were a blur. He stayed clear of hard drugs, but he reunited with pot and had never really been estranged from alcohol. He moved to Arlington and started selling storm windows out of the back of his truck. “I didn’t really have a lot of drive, but I was a good point-of-contact salesperson,” he said. “So if you came and found me at the strip club, I could sell you some windows.”
On the night of September 13, 1986—White slips the date into conversation as if he’s letting you know his birthday is coming up—a friend talked White into telling jokes at an open mike at an Arlington comedy club. It was his first taste of stand-up. Even more fateful, Jeff Foxworthy, then an unknown comedian himself, happened to be in the room. When White left the stage, Foxworthy took him aside and gave him tips on the proper positioning of punch lines in a bit. The next day the two played golf in Fort Worth. Leaving the course together, White collided head-on with a Suburban. He could have killed them both. They’ve been friends ever since.
Until then, White says he’d been a no-trick pony: “I knew my brain was good at something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.” Now that he knew, he got serious about being funny. He spent the next thirteen years playing low-paying comedy clubs, making friends with other comedians, studying their acts, and constantly seeking ways to make his own a little bit better.
So there’s no joke in his explanation of the precision in his act, and a close look at his routine reveals how carefully he lays it out. He grins with each punch line but airs a toothy “ta-da!” smile after longer, more involved bits. He litters his sets with callbacks, reoccurring punch lines that may sound weak on first telling but get bigger laughs each time they’re repeated. New material is “put in a hammock” between older, proven jokes for support. And every word spoken serves a purpose. “I used to do a bit about cheating on my first wife, and it’s a very complicated process to sell a cheating bit,” he said. “I pulled it off by making the audience hate her first. If they had liked this girl, they would have never let me cheat on her, but I told them she was from a wealthy family who hated my guts and that she wouldn’t have sex with me. By the time I set that up, the audience was like, ‘Go get some loving, big boy!’”
Of course, getting a straight answer out of a comedian, even a serious one ruminating on the subject of comedy, can be a tall order. I asked White about the stereotype of self-loathing comedians, about the demons in comics’ minds that supposedly drive them to denigrate themselves or others in front of large groups of people. He looked at me as though I’d just sneezed in his Scotch glass.
“Think about Sarah Silverman,” I said, referring to the surreally edgy, bicoastal (translation: non—Middle American) comedian who became a critics’ darling after releasing her own concert film last year. “She gets raped in every other joke in her routine. And those are jokes that she is telling.”
White looked down at his hands and mumbled, “I’d like to rape Sarah Silverman. I think Sarah Silverman is hot.” He lifted his head to see if I was laughing. “Look, I’m not easily offended,” he said. “And it’s certainly not my goal to offend anyone—or not. I want to make them laugh as hard as they physically can, to where they literally hurt the next day. This isn’t a chucklefest. I beat these people to death. And some of it’s thought-provoking, but some of it’s completely un-thought-provoking. I’m trying to write jokes, not treaties.”
“SEVEN YEARS AGO I was living in a friend’s attic,” said White, without a trace of nostalgia. “I’d just come out of a bad relationship and had been living in Mexico, where I owned and operated a pottery concern.” He made a little money doing stateside stand-up on the weekends, but most of that went to the employees back in Mexico. “I owed the IRS literally tens of thousands of dollars,” he said. “Then Jeff Foxworthy called and said, ‘If you play your cards right, you could be part of something really big.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t I just give you my cards and let you play them.’ He said, ‘Okay, well, just shut up then.’”
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