In the world of Larry the Cable Guy, comedy is a beautiful yet simple thing. You deliver one funny line after another and people laugh. Some of it may push the limits of taste and political correctness. Why examine it too closely?
"We live in a world where everybody wants to look so deep into things," Larry told the Herald. "But as long as people enjoy it, I enjoy making people laugh."
Larry will be at the Alerus Center at 8 tonight with his Tailgate Party Tour. He's been at the Alerus before, in 2005 and 2007. Tickets for tonight's show are $43.75 and are available at the Alerus Center box office and all Ticketmaster locations.
Larry, whose real name is Dan Whitney, grew up in southeastern Nebraska, and as a young man moved to the South, where he picked up his accent and his Larry character, a country good ol' boy who wears a flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off and a ratty baseball cap. Many of Larry's jokes are observations about rural life, fishing and his friends and family.
"I embellish things," he says modestly.
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In a telephone interview, he comes off as open, animated and confident but humble. He's a man with lots of accomplishments, a talent who built a cornpone comedy routine and his "git-r-done" catchphrase into a successful comedy tour (his own and the Blue Collar Comedy tour with comedians Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White), TV specials and movies, and monster DVD sales.
"I just do one-liners on everything," he said. "It just depends on whatever I'm talking about. I've got upwards of 420 punch lines, 440 or something like that. It's weird twists and stuff like that."
He likes to write topical stuff, but finds it sometimes has too short a shelf life for his style of touring. For instance, a joke about a photograph of rail-thin model Kate Moss snorting cocaine (Punch line: "I couldn't figure out what I was looking at, and then I realized she was the thin white line on the left") wasn't fresh anymore by the time he got on Jay Leno and wanted to tell it.
Right now, he's doing a lot of family humor, he said, because he just attended a family reunion.
"I'm not saying my aunt's big," he quipped, "but she was the only one who waited around after I was done cooking to lick the grill."
On the other hand, he's not afraid to riff on current events. His take on controversial talk show host Rush Limbaugh being dropped from a group looking to buy the St. Louis Rams was this:
"The NFL prides itself on being very racially diverse. Now, if you excuse me, I have tickets to see the Redskins and the Chiefs."
"When people don't like you or like what you're doing, or they're jealous of what you're doing, they label you a racist," he said. "You can't defend it."
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Whitney's success, he says, came from hard work. He recalled touring for two straight months, then taking a weekend to fish with a buddy when he got a phone call asking if he would appear -- for free -- the next evening in a special about country comedy at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. One of the hosts was Jeff Foxworthy.
"I didn't care that I wasn't getting paid," Whitney said. "I hadn't seen Jeff in a while. I thought it would be a good chance to see him. My main focus of that night was I had not worked in the Ryman Auditorium before. And maybe somebody would notice me."
The next day, he landed a spot on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, he said.
Next for Larry the Cable Guy? He's looking for a Christmas movie to do and, in 2011, he'll reprise his role as the voice of Mater the Tow Truck in "Cars II."
"It's a blast," he said of his voice role in the popular animated movie. "But I really get into character, so I always put on about 1,700 pounds."
Reach Tobin at (701) 780-1134; (800) 477-6572, ext. 134; or send e-mail to ptobin@gfherald.com .
