by Here’s one for all the 61-year-old raging alcoholics out there: Ron White has a new hour of stand-up comedy on Netflix.
White’s a great storyteller, what with his handy cigar and tequila, and treasure trove of anecdotes. In one of the less hilarious but even more insightful moments for stand-up comedy, White tells the audience: “Traditionally in American comedy clubs, there’s three acts. There’s an opening act, that makes between 100 and 200 a week for nine shows, the feature act — which is what I was — makes between 400 and 500 bucks for nine shows, and a headliner who can make absolutely anything depending upon who they are.” He was talking about an event that happened some 20 years ago, and yet, sadly, those dollar figures haven’t gotten much better now for non-headliners.
But back to White, the outlaw member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour whom I also compared to drunk uncles everywhere who don’t look like Bobby Moynihan’s SNL character, and to another bigger sitcom.
He’s a more believably real-life incarnation of The Beverly Hillbillies, growing up poor in dusty, rural Texas, only to strike it rich in comedy, and move in with his newest wife into a home they’ve built in Beverly Hills. While TV’s sitcom rednecks encountered cute culture clashes with their posh new neighbors, White regales us with how he has come to respect and almost admire the gay men in the West Hollywood bars near his home. More for how they don’t have to deal with marriage. Or didn’t use to, anyhow.
White, meanwhile, has survived both divorce and divorce lawyers, and has put a lot of thought into drunk-driving checkpoints, the handsomeness of Chris Hemsworth, and the “radical terrorist Canadian geese.”
I have always been a Ron White fan but after watching this hideously crude, obnoxious Netflix “special” I have to wonder when Ron White turned the corner from being funny to turning his drunken fantasies into a comedy act. His gratuitous shock “humor” sounded like the rantings of a drunk, not a well thought out comedy routine penned by someone who used to be funny. To imagine that I would find out that my former attorney had passed away by listening to Ron’s low rent, classless rants was the last straw. If I had paid big money for a ticket to see this, I’d have been beyond outraged. This disheveled pig needs to go back to Beverly Hills (omg the Clampetts had more class) and clean himself up.