BILL DEYOUNG,
September 11, 2008[/align]
Less than 60 seconds after he started talking from the Sunrise Theatre stage Thursday night, Ron White brought up what was on everybody’s mind. “I read the newspaper today,” the comedian said, and stood there grinning and puffing on a cigar, while 1,200 people cheered for a full minute.
White’s arrest at the Vero Beach Municipal Airport the previous day, on a possession of marijuana charge, provided the grist for the first 10 minutes of his act. “I looked outside the airplane and saw three cops standing there,” he told the sold-out crowd. “Which is never a good sign.” A tip had been called in that there were drugs on White’s plane. “The weed was in my pocket, so when he asked me ‘Are there drugs on the plane?’ I said ‘Absolutely not.’”
The department’s drug-sniffing dog was brought aboard the private aircraft, at which point White produced what he said was seven-eighths of one gram of marijuana. The plane was thoroughly searched, producing nothing, but then, White said, the officer told him he had called it in, and had been instructed to place the comedian under arrest. “For this?” he asked, incredulous. “So they handcuffed me there on the tarmac and brought me down there to jail,” White said.
The audience booed and hissed. “It’s not like I’ve never done it before,” he said, and they cheered. “I’ve been in jail before; I’m not bitching about that. What I’m worried about, I got a show about to start and I still have to get processed.”
White had $23,000 in cash in his possession, and he sweated bullets while it was counted. Slowly. “They did not pick the smartest employee to count it,” he said. No one in the jail seemed to know how to efficiently use a computer, either, White explained. The process reminded him, he told the audience, of slow-witted TV deputy Barney Fife.
The rest of White’s 75-minute act consisted of his trademark, slow-burning takes on such topics as monogamous sex (“She knows what I like, and I know what she won’t do”) and his idea for new “Heightened States of Awareness” levels for the Department of Homeland Security (“One, go find a helmet; two, put on your helmet”). He is famously intolerant of stupidity; no comic working today does a better impatient, insincere smile than Ron White.
The Vero Beach incident re-appeared several times during the show. As he talked about his days as part of the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour,” White mentioned his co-performers: “Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Idiot.” That last name drew a lot of laughs, which prompted White to add, with a smirk: “Although I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in jail last night.”
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