I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability

by Ron White

  And we would trudge off down the road—with no money. Sammy was as broke as me. He was comin’ out of bankruptcy with a grocery store and he had tax debts.

  We were quite a pair. We were just trying to find a way to build a life.

  We would go to the highest end part of Dallas, called Highland Park, in the Datsun B210, and try to sell these expensive windows to builders. And at lunch every day we would sit on the hood of his Datsun B210 in front of a 7-Eleven in Highland Park, and eat one 7-Eleven hot dog each.

  You know how 7-Eleven stores have a chili dispenser and a cheese dispenser, and then an onion and relish and mustard thing? And I guess they assume that you’re going to use a reasonable amount of these products.

  Not if you only have 75 cents for lunch.

  We would buy our hot dogs and they would give ’em to us in these paper box containers that they use. And we would take our boxes to the condiments counter, and open them up, and just fill the whole thing up with chili and cheese and onion and relish. You can put three or four pounds of stuff in there if you really want to.

  Then we’d walk out trying not to let them see what we’d done. We’d sit on the hood of the Datsun B210 and eat our one hot dog apiece with fixings. And then we’d drink out of a hose at the side of the 7-Eleven.

  In 1986 the Funny Bone chain of comedy clubs opened up a club in Arlington, Texas, between where I lived and where I worked. Sammy went to an open-mic night and he came back and said, “Ron, you’re funnier than these guys. You need to go over there on open-mic night.”

  So I scribbled down five minutes of rip-snorting comedy, auditioned for the club manager, and got rejected. But I’m a persistent dog, and I went back on the next open-mic night.

  That’s when I met Jeff Foxworthy, one of the luckiest things ever to happen to me. Jeff was headlining at the Funny Bone, and he was gracious enough to be there on open-mic night and listen to everybody and then close the night with some stuff of his own.

  I did my five minutes, and milked a few laughs out of the audience. My material wasn’t really all that good, but I had the basics a comedian needs, a sense of timing, and so on.

  When I came offstage the first person I saw was Jeff, and he comes up to me and he says, “Man, you’re really funny. But you need to put the punch line at the end of the joke.”

  I was like, “What?”

  He goes, “You need to put the punch line at the end of the joke.”

  And Jeff sat down with me, a first-time-ever comedian, and he was so generous. He said, “Let’s start with your first joke.” He wrote it out on a piece of paper, and he said, “You’re saying the funny thing here in the middle, and then you still have something else to say. So people are laughing, but you keep talking, and then you have that awkward moment at the end. If you switch things around, you can say the punch line at the end, and then just look at ’em and watch ’em laugh.”

  I’m like, “No shit.”

  Today, that’s second nature to me. But it’s a learned skill. Every comedian has to learn about structuring a joke and a series of jokes and a whole set. As natural as Foxworthy was at that relatively early point in his career—he hadn’t been doing stand-up for very long and he was already a headliner—he still had to learn it from other good comedians.

  The next day Jeff and I played golf, and we were involved in a vehicular incident. And we really bonded as friends from that point on.

  That open-mic experience, with Jeff Foxworthy’s feedback to validate me, was the beginning of my life as a journeyman comedian. I traveled all over the South and up through the Midwest in my pickup truck, doing little clubs.

  I did that for about three years, working my way up to being the opening act at good clubs like the Improv in Dallas. And I was the opening act there when Sam Kinison came to town to do a sold-out concert for two thousand people at the Dallas Convention Theater. To that point I’d never appeared before more than 350 people.

  For some reason, Sam’s usual opening act couldn’t make it. The promoter called the Improv the day of the show, and asked if they had anybody there who could step in that night. And the people at the Improv asked me if I wanted to take a shot at it.

  I was hyperventilating, “Ah, ah, ah, ah—OK.”

  Sam Kinison’s brother was his manager, and he told me, “If it doesn’t go well, don’t be afraid. A lot of times the audience treats Sam’s opening act like a sacrificial lamb. They’ll just start screamin’ and hollerin’ and goin’ crazy. If that happens, don’t worry about it.”

  In one way that’s kind of encouraging, because nobody’s expecting that much from me, and in another way it’s not. I didn’t know if I was sunk before I went out onstage or what.

  I went out there, I did the first joke, and it got a laugh. I did the next joke, and it got a laugh. I’m beginning to enjoy myself.

  Now, as an opening-act comedian, I had about twenty minutes of material. I was supposed to do ten minutes before Sam Kinison came out. But I did ten minutes, and he hadn’t arrived yet. So I started doing the rest of my stuff as slowly as possible, and I managed to make my act last thirty minutes.

  When I came offstage, Sam’s bodyguard came up to me and said that Sam wanted to meet me before he went on. Now at the time, in 1989, Sam Kinison was as big a headliner as there was in comedy, and I was a huge fan of his myself. So I was really in awe of him.

  They took me to meet him backstage, and he says, “I heard you killed ’em, Cowboy.”

  I go, “It’s a fun crowd.”

  He says, “Let me show you how to do it.” And he went out there and just murdered the audience. He had them screaming with laughter.

  After Sam’s performance, a lot of people came backstage, including some top people from the Funny Bone chain, the Last Laugh chain, and the Punchline chain of comedy clubs. And one of the guys who owned the Funny Bone said, “Ron, let’s go to dinner and talk about your career,” which represents a giant break for me.

  That’s what I’m hearing in one ear. In the other ear, I’m hearing Sam Kinison saying, “C’mon, Cowboy, let’s go out in the limo and party.”

  True to form, I went out in the limo to party with Sam. Luckily for me, the next day the people from the comedy clubs still wanted to talk to me. Almost immediately I was booked for fifty weeks a year as a featured performer in all these chains of comedy clubs at $550 a week. That sounded like retirement money to me then.

  So that moved me up another level. But mostly I was still playing in the same comedy clubs all through the Midwest and the South. I had a lot of fun doing that. And my idea anyway was to stay in the Midwest and the South and get as good as I could before I tried to crack the Northeast and the West Coast. Because I knew the headline comedians in Los Angeles and New York were really good, and I didn’t want to go in anywhere with half a plate of material.

  4

  ONSTAGE: SET 2

  I’m a dog lover. Actually, I love my dog, I don’t give a shit about your dog. I don’t know your dog. Your dog could be an asshole, I don’t know.

  My dog, Sluggo, is an English bulldog. Sluggo’s like, “Don’t jack with me.”

  You know what I do to him when he’s asleep? I lift up those big ole huge bulldog jowls, and I hide M&M’s and shit in there. He wakes up in the morning, he’s like, “Slurp-slop-slurp! It’s going to be a good day, Tater.” He calls me Tater.

  He’s a great dog. He’s sick right now, which is a pain in the butt, because if he gets sick, you can’t just feed him medicine, he’ll spit it out. You got to hide it in a piece of cheese.

  I stud him out last year for pick of the litter. And I put him with the female dog for a couple of weeks, and then to make sure it took, I took him down to the veterinarian’s office and had artificial insemination done twice.

  Now for those of you that don’t know, that’s where they obtain the semen from Sluggo manually, by hand, and put it in the female dog. And now it don’t take shit to get old Sluggo to go to the vet. He loves t
he place.

  I went down there. The veterinarian had the audacity to say to me, “Mr. White, if you’ll just come on back here, we’ll show you how to do this. Next time you don’t have to bring in the dog, you can just bring in the semen.”

  I went, “That’s OK. You go ahead and jack off the dog. He follows me around too much as it is.”

  Like I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this bulldog.

  “Don’t jack with me, Tater. Jack me off!”

  “Get out of here. We got company.”

  “You did it the other day.”

  “Do it yourself.”

  “I don’t have any thumbs. I don’t have any goddamn thumbs. Now jack me off, you piece of shit.”

  “Is that the way we talk to Daddy?”

  “Please. Please jack me off, you piece of shit. I don’t have any goddamn thumbs.”

  I’ll tell you a little bit more about the demise of my relationship with the woman from the wealthy family. There was that one thing where I had sex with that girl in Columbus, but that wasn’t the underlying problem.

  The big problem was, we lived in a house, and it had a thermostat. That’s it!

  ’Cause I liked the temperature of the house between seventy and seventy-five, and she liked the temperature of the house between seventy-five and a-hundred-and-fucking-ten. And you can’t keep tater salad at that temperature.

  We fought about it. She was psycho. Psycho women love me.

  We have an argument one night about the temperature of the dwelling. She goes outside with a butcher knife and cuts the tires on my truck.

  So I drug up an old Polaroid and entered her in Hustler’s “Beaver Hunt.” And she won. And I used the money to get me some new tires.

  And she superglued my dick to my stomach. So you see how things just get out of hand?

  Still itches.

  After three years of being married to this woman, I still didn’t understand her. She would get mad at me when I was trying to help her.

  I’ll give you an example. Let’s say she’d wake up in the morning and be real bitchy. Let’s just say.

  And I knew in my heart she was suffering from PMS. And out of my love for her, I would offer her a Midol. And tell her, “Honey, I believe if you eat this Midol, you won’t bitch quite so much.”

  She would growl at me and wouldn’t eat the Midol. I had to hide it in a piece of cheese.

  I was having an argument about Osama bin Laden with somebody one day. And the argument came up because this country said that if they caught him, they wouldn’t extradite him to a state in the United States that had the death penalty.

  I’m like, “I don’t care.” And my buddy’s all bent out of shape about it: “I’ll blow the towel off his head.”

  ’Cause that’s who I hang out with. It bent him out of shape that I wasn’t upset about it. He goes, “How come you ain’t upset? I know you’re pro-death penalty. How come that don’t make you mad?”

  “You know, I’ll tell you why it doesn’t make me mad. Because spiritually, Osama bin Laden is prepared to die for Islam. But I guarantee you: Spiritually, Osama bin Laden is ill-prepared to lick jelly out of Thunder Dick’s butt crack.”

  “I hate grape jelly.”

  “Shut up and lick my butt! And you got to do a good job too, ’cause you’re in this till Thunder Dick comes. It ain’t just a ‘Nah, nah, there I did it.’ Boy, you gotta try. You gotta tickle the inside of Thunder Dick’s thigh. You gotta fondle Thunder Dick’s nut sack a little bit. ’Cause if you don’t make him come pretty quick, you’re gonna run out of jelly.”

  Comedy is not always pretty, folks. Every once in a while somebody will get tongue-fucked in the ass right in the middle of a humorous situation.

  I really enjoy performing at the Indian casinos that are popping up around the country. They’re all really nice places; the people from all the tribes are great.

  I was performing at this new Indian casino up near the Canadian border. And they picked me up in a Mini Cooper. I’m like, “Where am I supposed to sit?”

  This guy’s defending this car like it’s the greatest thing ever made. He’s like, “Oh, no, no, this is made by BMW. It’s a great car. You’ll see.”

  We go outside. His battery’s dead.

  So I give him a jump off my iPod, which is considerably more powerful, it turns out.

  I wound up having a great time there and I’m looking forward to going back. But some of these new Indian casinos I know are bogus. Like I was in northern California, performing for the Benihana tribe. I was like, “You know what? Bullshit.”

  I met the chief. He was the Indian from the Village People.

  Just because you have a feather doesn’t mean you can open up a casino.

  I was at another Indian casino in Hollywood, Florida, in the fall. I performed at the Hard Rock Casino on the Seminole Reservation. And at seventy years old, my mother is my biggest fan, and I called her and I told her where I was. And I hear my father in the background going, “What’d he say?”

  And my mother said, “He said in Hollywood, you need reservations to get a cinnamon roll.”

  “What, Mother?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “You’re right.”

  I lost my ass at that casino. I’ll give you some idea how my luck went. The last night I was there, I put a dollar in a soda machine, and nothing came out.

  I didn’t even get pissed. I just moved on to the next machine, put a dollar in it.

  A drink came out, and I was there till dawn. I won four and a half cases of Diet 7-Up.

  At a lot of casinos now, they have all these penny slots. How pathetic, you know?

  The only thing more pathetic than playing penny slots is watching somebody play penny slots.

  “You won a nickel.”

  But different strokes for different folks, you know? One night I saw a whole family playing penny slots, and they were having a lot of fun. Laughing and giggling.

  And the littlest kid won a bunch of pennies. And he shared them with his older brothers and sisters. You know how little kids just spontaneously share?

  “They took my pennies, Mommy!”

  “Did they get them all? No? Let me have those! Hey, look at all the pennies the brat had.”

  “WAAH!!!!”

  And it got me thinking on a new slogan for the casino industry:

  “The family that slots together, stays together.” Bet on it.

  I’ll tell you how I lost my ass at the Indian casino. The trouble was, I started watching those Texas Hold ’Em tournaments on television. I mean, I’m watching those tournaments like a four-year-old watching the Road Runner.

  And the only thing that’s dangerous about doing that is that if you watch those shows long enough, you start to think you can play that game for real. But you go into one of those big poker rooms, you find out really quick that they don’t let you see everybody else’s cards.

  I’m sitting there going, “How am I supposed to know how much to bet?”

  That Indian casino was beating my ass like a tomtom at the poker table.

  I love westerns, you know. But if they made a western that was set today, to be accurate, instead of the Indians surrounding the settlers and shooting burning arrows at the covered wagons, they’d be saying, “How about a friendly little game of poker, Paleface? See that smoke signal? That’s where our new casino is.

  “No money? No problem. We’ll stake you a stack of chips on the wagon.”

  That little tour in Florida, our second stop was in Fort Myers. My wife and I wanted to go nearby there to Sanibel and Captiva Islands. That’s basically where Jimmy Buffett lived when he was making “Margaritaville.” A very, very cool place—very romantic.

  The only way to get there is across this rickety little wooden toll bridge. And the toll to cross this bridge is six bucks.

  To cross a little rickety fucking bridge. I expected there to be a troll and some billy goats or something.
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  And I make a lot of money. Not doing comedy. I sell shrimp out of a van.

  But six bucks seems like a lot of money. And then when you get up to the little cage where you pay the toll, I swear to God it’s true, there’s a little sign that says, “No coins or cash.”

  What do they want you to give ’em, a hand job?

  “Buddy, if you just raise that gate a little bit, I’ll get my family through. Could you please think of something naughty? My hand is getting tired. I’m only gonna do this for another thirty minutes, and then we’re just going to go over to another beach.”

  When I’m touring, my wife and I usually travel on a big tour bus with our three dogs. We have two Scottish terriers, because if you drink enough Johnnie Walker products, eventually they just send you the dogs. And I qualified early last year.

  Their names are Birdie and Bogey. People say, “That’s cute. They’re named after your golf game.”

  I’m like, “If they were named after my golf game, they’d be Double Bogey and Where the Fuck Is That Ball Going?” Which is a kind of a long name for a pet.

  “Come here, Where the Fuck Is That Ball Going? Go get the ball, Where the Fuck Is That Ball Going? Where the fuck did that ball go, Where the Fuck Is That . . .”

  Then there’s my English bulldog, Sluggo. He ran away last year, and he was gone for ten hours. All day.

  When he came home, just to piss him off, I took him for a walk.

  I was in my backyard one day picking up dog shit. And I realized I now have four people working for me full-time. And I’m wondering, “How did I wind up picking up the dog shit?”