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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Foxworthy’s big something was the Blue Collar tour, a four-way package featuring his own redneck-centricity bits, plus White, the exurban-Cosby bit of Bill Engvall, and Dan Whitney, who would become known to the world as Larry the Cable Guy. Modeled after the wildly successful Original Kings of Comedy—Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac, D. L. Hughley, and Cedric the Entertainer—the Blue Collar tour was an instant success when it opened in January 2000. Over the next few years, the country quartet performed in ninety cities, bringing in more than $15 million and rivaling their urban counterparts as the highest-grossing comedy tour ever. Eventually, the four Blue Collar comics became so popular individually that they couldn’t fit group shows into their schedules, but the three DVDs spawned by the tour, featuring concert footage and fish-out-of-water vignettes shot in locales like a spa and a Victoria’s Secret shop, went on to sell more than five million copies. The first DVD, produced for less than $3 million, grossed $38 million. For White, a journeyman comic who’d spent thirteen years amassing that glorious tax debt, the sudden success couldn’t have been more welcome.
So it was a good thing he followed Foxworthy’s suggestion about shutting his mouth. “The first time he told me about the Blue Collar tour, I thought, ‘That’s retarded,’” he said. “Two of the comedians would be doing fifty-minute sets. That’s already too long for a comedy show. The other two”—he and Larry, then relative unknowns—“would be doing ten minutes, and then we’d all come back to do thirty together at the end of the show? Ridiculous.” His mouth was the source of another concern. Foxworthy envisioned a show that people could sit through with their grandmothers, and White’s penchant for F-bombs and bits about masturbating ran counter to that strategy.
Wisely, White straightened up, and as Blue Collar became a national phenomenon, so did Tater Salad. According to Nielsen SoundScan, in the past three years he’s sold two million DVDs of his own, plus 750,000 CDs. His book, a verbatim transcript of the bits on his DVDs, with occasional illustrations of punch lines, has sold more than 70,000 copies. He’s become an inescapable presence on cable TV. “Comedy Central is like one big Ron White infomercial,” White said. Meanwhile, the Blue Collar tour started a large merchandising campaign, and truck stops that for years were the only outlet for White’s CDs also sold Ron White air fresheners. “That just got ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, what’s that going to smell like, spilt Scotch? I’m sorry that ever happened. Now I can’t make fun of anybody. There are Ron White dolls? I can’t even make fun of Carrot Top.”
But he cashed all the checks and is now growing accustomed to a different life. Three years ago he was making $2,500 for a week’s worth of shows, plus airfare. Now he makes about $300,000. The beer and cigarettes he used to take onstage had long given way to Scotch and cigars, but now the Scotch is often 25-year-old Macallan—he jokes that he won’t stick with one brand without a healthy endorsement deal—and the cigars are Cuban Davidoffs. He moved up to $5,000 Brioni suits. He bought a home in Atlanta and one in California. He started driving a Bentley and traveling in a Prevost luxury-liner tour bus.
Understandably, White feels good about it all. “Foxworthy said, ‘Never let them know you’ve got money,’” White said, “and I’m like, ‘What, they can’t do the math?’ Jeff himself lives in a mansion in Atlanta that looks like a college. So, no, I don’t apologize for it. I let my fans know that I live in a gigantic house that they bought me. And I think they cheer for guys like me. I think they want somebody who was living in somebody’s attic to make it big. It gives everybody hope that if you keep pedaling that bike, maybe it’ll happen to you.”
The one drawback White sees is that he can no longer drop in unannounced at a comedy club. Working an open-mike night is like time in a batting cage for a comedian, but if White sits in the back of a comedy club now, the audience tends to face the wrong direction. It’s disrespectful to the comics onstage.
So two or three times a year White convenes in Austin with four of his old comedian buddies under the rubric of the Texas Hill Country Comedy Writers Association. He puts them up in a hotel, and they work out new bits. The association had in fact been together the ten days before White’s Paramount gig. He’d scheduled a mini-tour of Texas and rented a second bus for his associates to follow him from town to town. Each night a different friend opened for him, and then the next day they’d all gather on the back bus and critique videos of the shows.
But the creation of comedy is a singular craft, and it’s no accident that the first three letters of the association’s abbreviated name are T, H, and C. That back bus may have been a conference room by day, but it was something entirely other at night. “We had a disco ball with a little laser light on it,” said White, “and the music was cranking. It was a smoke-filled Cheech and Chong bus. We acted like pure idiots every single night.” The rolling workshop had more than a little to do with his condition as he prepared for that last Paramount show.
Had selling windows been this much fun, maybe White would have tried harder at that. Despite his success, not to mention his surliness, part of him still plays for the love of the game. “I’ve got movie offers and television offers, including a very interesting one from HBO,” he said. “But I’m not doing any of it. I asked the universe to make me a famous comedian, and then it did. I’d kind of hate to turn my back on the universe after it did what I asked.”
IF PART OF THE FUN of drinking whisky is losing your inhibitions or tearing down walls, part of the misery of a hangover is getting those walls rebuilt, a project typically undertaken with plenty of other pounding going on inside the head. It’s not a pretty process, but once your head is cleared, you get to go back to being you.
I reached Ron White on his cell phone a week after the Paramount show, and he graciously informed me that he didn’t have long to talk. He was on his way to audition for that new HBO series. That he appeared to be hedging his bet with the universe wasn’t the only thing that distinguished this second conversation from the one on the bus. His voice was an octave higher. He wife was riding with him to the audition to lend moral support, and I heard them address each other sweetly by pet names; they call each other “Hominy.”
The bluster was gone. I needed to nail down specifics about just how well his career was going, but he seemed embarrassed when pressed for hard dollar figures. Finally he said, “I’ve got a very nice dialogue coach who I’ve worked with for fifteen years, and lately she’s been helping me prepare to read for this part. I’m going to recarpet her house, hopefully without her knowing about it. I want it to be a surprise. My success is great because it allows me to do stuff for my friends that they don’t expect.”
His comedy buddies in Texas offered up even more good deeds by White. Last winter he dropped everything to come to Austin to work a comedy benefit organized for Katrina relief. With Tater Salad atop the marquee, the event raised $85,000. Earlier this year, when one of the THC writers casually mentioned that he’d be late to the spring workshop because of car trouble, White surprised him with a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup. A whirl around tatersalad.com reveals that unlike Larry the Cable Guy, whose site links to Fox News, the Drudge Report, and the Professional Bull Riders—Larry never leaves character—White’s links to the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Sunshine Camp, for children with terminal illnesses. And White himself did brag about buying his mother a house and his 72-year-old stepfather a nose job. “Actually, he has a disease that made his nose keep growing,” said White before expelling what sounded like a giggle. “When my mother told me about it, I said, ‘A nose job? Does he want to start dating?’ Now he looks so good, I might get him a face-lift. He could be a movie star.”
And as White freely admits, at least in his quieter moments, there is nothing wrong with that.
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