Ron White has big plans rattling around in his smoky, scotch-tinged brain.
But the avuncular comedian, known from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour as the dapper guy with the perpetual cigar and glass of top-shelf Johnnie Walker, has a hard time implementing them.
“I’m thinking about opening a club in (Atlanta),” White said recently from Montecito, Calif., his home away from Atlanta. “I would love to have a place close to my house where I could go work out every day. I could be the opening act and have all this stage time to develop new stuff.”
White is up to his neck in projects, whether it’s touring, hooking up with his Blue Collar Comedy cohorts or releasing best-selling books, CDs and DVDs. He’s also the first comedian to receive Grammy nominations for two pieces of work in the same year.
We caught up with the 51-year-old comedian to chat about the universality of blue-collar comedy and why he’s happy his fame didn’t happen any earlier.
Q: You’re the paragon of a dues-payer: You grew up in Texas oil country, went to Vietnam and battled, then beat hard drugs when you got back. And I understand you used to sell windows?
A: Yeah… if it had happened to me any earlier I could have died of a drug overdose. When I was 22 or 23 I was eating acid and going on stage. I’m especially scared for some of these kids that win “Last Comic Standing.” Any time someone achieves success before they’ve earned it, it always comes back to haunt them.
Q: Are you thinking of anyone in particular?
A: I’m not the judge of who that is, but I am a believer that no debt in the universe goes unpaid. If you try to buy early you’ll pay late.
Q: What makes you different?
A: I was a seasoned guy doing nine shows a week for 16 years. I was considered solid. If you become famous and don’t have a live show to back it up, they’re not going to pay you any money. You’ll have all these opportunities but you need an hour and 20 minutes of (material). That’s not easy to do. It took me probably 12 or 15 years just to do shows that long that were worth watching.
Q: Are there any northern cities hostile to your sort of Southern humor?
A: Not at all. I just did a show in Houlton, Maine, which is this little town about 2 miles south of Canada, and I sold over 5,000 tickets. There’s only 6,000 people in the whole town, so they came from all over northern Maine to see the show.
Q: Do you do that well everywhere?
A: It’s real universal. We get tons of requests for Europe and even some e-mails from Asia where people are huge into Southern humor. Just in the first two “Blue Collar” movies we sold about 7 million albums. I’ve sold another 2 million of my own stuff, either DVD or records, so it’s pretty spread out.
Q: Do you really think you’d do well overseas?
A: There’s recently been talk of bringing the four of us (White, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall) to Royal Albert Hall in England to film it for a DVD release. We all agreed in theory to do it.
Q: Do you ever feel overshadowed by the other three guys?
A: I was by far the least popular of the Blue Collar crew when we started. There was a definite pecking order and everybody knew it. But we’re all still dear friends today. I just saw Jeff at the CMT awards a few weeks ago.
Q: Do you think the Blue Collar phenomenon tapped into an underserved market?
A: We were all doing what we were doing anyway and didn’t specially go after anyone. That’s just who was going to comedy clubs. We were just looking for new ways not to have a job.
Ron White plays the Buell Theatre at 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $44.75 and available through Ticketmaster.
