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This is the most successful comic in America: a paunchy forty-two-year-old white guy in a sleeveless flannel shirt and a crappy baseball cap. At a sold-out show in Pittsburgh, he grips the mike and slouches his way across the stage like he's coming to fix a busted carburetor. With an exaggerated Southern drawl and a mouth that seems full of chaw, he launches into his routine: "They have Bibles in hotel rooms now. What's that for, to swear in the hookers?" gets a good laugh. Describing Michael Moore as "three M&M's away from holy shit!" gets a better one.
Then he does a double-take: He spots something behind him. "Aw, those are my shadows," he says, relieved. "I thought a couple black guys were sneaking up behind me." Huge laugh.
Meet Larry the Cable Guy -- the slightly dim, often racist, completely redneck, 100 percent Republican alter ego of Dan Whitney. If you don't live in a red state, you've probably never heard of him, but after nineteen years of doing stand-up gigs and right-wing political commentary on the radio, he's king of the hill. Comedy albums have been roadkill in recent years, but now people are eating fried possum: Larry's second album, The Right to Bare Arms, debuted at Number Seven earlier this month, the highest-charting comedy record since Steve Martin in 1978. Only four comedians have ever charted higher. This is heady stuff for a guy best known for the WB's Blue Collar TV, where he's part of an ensemble of good-ol'-boy comics led by Jeff Foxworthy. Still, his fans fill theaters and even arenas: Last year, Larry had the top-grossing comedy tour, beating Chris Rock. Far more than Rock or even Foxworthy, Larry seems to have tapped into something powerful and unexpected in America. But what, exactly?
"My crowd is good, honest, hard-working Americans," Larry says after the show. "They don't hate anybody, they just want to enjoy themselves, and they're not into that PC crap." They may not think of being a Larry fan as an expression of cultural identity, but of course humor requires a shared set of assumptions. In this case, the worldview includes the beliefs that Hilary Clinton is Satan, The Dukes of Hazzard got canceled because Hollywood hates country boys, and NASCAR is the world's greatest sport. But some of Larry's punch lines reflect uglier attitudes:
"I was more pissed than a queer with lockjaw on Valentine's Day."
"This is a song about an illegal Mexican hitchhiking through Texas. I call it 'El Paso.'"
"There'll be a new show out next week called Black Eye on the Queer Guy."
"He's good at what he does," concedes fellow comedian David Cross. "It's a lot of anti- gay, racist humor -- which people like in America -- all couched in 'I'm telling it like it is.' He's in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I'm-just-a -straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel-selling-ring -tones act. That's where we are as a nation now. We're in a stage of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride."
Larry shrugs off such criticism. "The only people who are uptight at my shows are politically correct white people," he insists. "They have to take in the social implication of the joke before they can laugh. Just lighten up!" Larry does have his own set of taboos, and they're very red-state-centric: "I don't say the f word, and I don't take the Lord's name in vain."
Dan Whitney grew up in Nebraska on a pig farm. When he was sixteen, his family moved to Florida. His father was a preacher who once played guitar with the Everly Brothers. In 1986, Dan tried local stand-up on a dare. Two years later, he started calling in to a Tampa radio station as various characters: an old Jewish lady, a swishy gay man and Larry.
"Once he discovered that the Larry character could talk about anything, it took on a life of its own," says Lewis Black of The Daily Show. "But how do the rednecks hear it as a compliment?"
Offstage, with his drawl dialed down, Dan Whitney is smarter than his creation but shares most of his opinions. At a Wal-Mart in Washington, Pennsylvania, he signs hundreds of autographs for fans ranging from toddlers to grandparents. They're almost all white, and some wear T-shirts extolling Christ ("Not in Vain") and deer hunting ("Fear No Deer"). Sitting between Housewares and Artificial Flowers, Larry exudes the aura of a country star. Says eighteen-year-old Jessica Cummings, "Whenever he talks, he just understands how everyone is."