Ron White keeps 'em rolling in the aisles
By ROBERT LOPEZ, The Enterprise
09/29/2007[/align]
The laughter seldom let up at the Julie Rogers Theatre Friday night as the cigar-smoking Ron White took the stage and offered up his views on military spending, Latin American real estate schemes and stinky paper mills. A sold-out crowd, sporting nice dresses and Tater Salad T-shirts, greeted the 50-year-old comedian who is best known for work alongside Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy on the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour."
The evening kicked off around 7:30 with a performance by flame-haired Austin comedian Nancy Reed, who struck a chord with some jokes about the Gulf Coast region. "I used to think Kansas sucked," she said. "But then I saw Pasadena, Texas ... The air is always greener in Pasadena."
White, came to the stage about 8, dressed in a black suit and red shirt, cigar in one hand, glass tumbler in the other, with a bottle of whiskey waiting for him on a stool next to the mic-stand. The gray-haired funnyman also poked fun at the area, and talked about getting sued by Crown Paper because he made a joke about the smell emanating from their Houston mill. The bit elicited one of loudest crowd responses of the night.
"It's like I let some big cat of the bag, like people didn't know it stunk until I let the cat out of the bag," he said. "I grew up next to there, so I thought the whole world smelled like that. Later (after he moved away) I was out and was like 'That smells great, what is that?' It was a sewer treatment plant. They should bottle that up and sell it to the people in Houston."
White then brought up a Houston Chronicle story that mentioned that on some days, more than 2 million people could smell what was coming out of the paper mill. "If it was music and 2 million people could hear it, they'd make you shut it the fuck off," he said.
He offered up an elaborate scheme to sell off real estate to foreign countries to fund the war in Iraq and take over Mexico and Central America in the process. White also proposed scrapping the color-coded alert system and replacing it with one that consists basically of "go out and buy a helmet," and "put the helmet on."
And he didn't refrain from making fun of his fellow "Blue Collar" comedians either. "I'm doing a show 'Are You Smarter than Larry the Cable Guy,'" he said, referencing the popular "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader' hosted by Foxworthy. "The good thing is everybody wins. Just show up and you get a boat. I have a feeling it's going to be very popular."
Interview On IGN (audio)
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This guy was the only one of the comedians on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour dvds that I thought was any good. He's just old-school and funny. He's not exactly cutting the edge of political satire, but his honesty about real things like drinking and smoking is great to hear...
