From The Comic's Comic

A Blue Collar comedian comes clean

This week’s Tuesday Transcript arrives on a Thursday. Two reasons for this: 1) I’ve been “on assignment,” as they say in the news biz, working on a project that should result in an upcoming Piffany (as well as some much-needed cash during a slow September), and 2) the surprising death of comedian Norm Macdonald on Tuesday prompted my buddy who runs Decider dot com (Mark Graham) to ask me to file a tribute to Norm. You can read that here.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to this week’s podcast guest…Bill Engvall!

Above: Bill Engvall, captured in a candid moment during filming of his new Circle TV series, Blue Collar Auction.

Out of all of the “Blue Collar Comedy” guys, I knew perhaps the least about Bill Engvall. I’d interviewed Larry the Cable Guy (Dan Whitney) a few times over the years, interacted with Ron White in real life, and Jeff Foxworthy has been such a public figure for so long, you’d be hard-pressed to call him an enigma. But Engvall? Color me quite curious in advance of the kind of conversation we’d have over Zoom.

Our chat turned out great! Even if, or perhaps precisely because, we dove deep into some weighty topics, such as depression and alcoholism.

Notice how Engvall repeats himself over the course of a few minutes about the loneliness of working the road. He tells me about how signing with J.P. Williams as his manager saved his life and turned it around, even before he teamed up with J.P.’s other main comedy client, Foxworthy, to form the beginnings of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. That’s how it started. First Engvall got the role as Foxworthy’s friend in The Jeff Foxworthy Show when it got mostly recast in switching TV networks between seasons one and two. Then: Williams took Foxworthy’s club/theater tour (and opener), paired with Engvall’s club/theater tour (and his opener).

After all of the Blue Collar madness — the tour, the special, the sketch comedy series — ended, and after Engvall’s own TBS series aired (he still calls his TV daughter “Jenny” btw; that’s Jenny as in Jennifer Lawrence), he went on Dancing with the Stars in 2013 and made it to the finals! He clearly loved recounting his DWTS nights, and why he chose that show and turned down other “reality TV” offers.

Even if more than a few people thought Engvall performed in the banana suit on The Masked Singer.

Who was in the banana suit? Bret Michaels.

So yes. In 2020, TV viewers confused Bill Engvall with Bret Michaels. What a strange world we’re living in.

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Here is an edited and slightly condensed transcript of my conversation with Bill Engvall.

Sean L. McCarthy: Has radio gotten any easier over the last 30, 40 years?

Bill Engvall: It’s gotten easier in the sense that I’ve learned how to do what I call good radio. I think one mistake that some comics make is they don’t want to do their material on the air because they’re afraid then everybody’s heard it, and I’m like you’re on for two minutes, three minutes max. You’re OK. You’re OK. And the thing that any radio person will tell you, is that what they hate is the yes and no answers. Like ‘So you’re on tour now?’ ‘Yep.’

Me: Sounds like how, you know, they say comedy is like jazz. It’s not the words you say, it’s the spaces between the words!

Engvall: Yeah, I will tell you this, it has not gotten easier getting up early. I remember early in my career, oh my gosh I would do these things all the time and it never bothered me but as I’ve gotten older, it’s like, oh I gotta be up at what? 5:30?

Me: Although in radio, of course it doesn’t matter what you look like. That leads into my, my first and perhaps, hopefully last trivial question. So in the promotional material for your tour a lot of it your clean shaven, but as I can see now, you are, you’re fully coiffed.

Engvall: Yeah.

Me: Do you feel like you’re a different comedian with facial hair than without?

Engvall: You know, I’ve actually wrestled with this. I like the beard but sometimes it hides subtle facial expressions. But the wife likes it. So, guess who gets number one vote.

Me: And then of course the less trivial question is, I wasn’t aware you could retire from stand up comedy.

Engvall: You know what, Sean, I’ll tell you what’s happened. When I started this 42 years ago, A) it’s lasted 41 years longer than I thought it would. I never had any idea that life would be where it is today. But I always knew at some point it was going to end, one way or the other. And what I wanted to do was to always go out on my terms, and you know the show’s great. I’m healthy, my wife’s healthy, our family’s good, and you just know. I’ve thought about this for a while, you know, this was not an overnight or nor an easy decision to make, but I’ll tell you what happened was, when COVID hit, and I wasn’t able to do a show for over a year, when the shows finally started going back online, I realized I caught, I found myself not being as excited as I thought I’d be to get back to work. You know, and listen, you’ve been to shows, I’ve been to shows where you thought at the end of the show, they should have stopped last year. I never want to be that guy, because I’ve got the greatest fans on the planet. They’ve supported me for 40-plus years. And I never wanted to cheat them. If I couldn’t go out there and give them my all, then I knew it was time to step away. The other thing is that… people see you on stage and they think oh what a great job you know you’re making people laugh, and you’re right. For 90 minutes I got 2-3,000 new best friends. But then they all go home and you got 22 and a half hours in a Red Roof Inn or a Holiday Inn or whatever. And I don’t care what anybody says, the road takes years off your life, just to fly in and being away from family and all that so, I sat down with my wife and I just said it’s time. And she’s like, I’m good with it. So it’s, but I will tell you this. I mean I’d be lying to say, there’s gonna be times I’m gonna miss it. Because stand-up is one of the most wonderful venues that I’ve been blessed and honored to be a part of for a long time, because it’s — comedy is on a personal level. You know you can go listen to a band and they may play a song you don’t like but, you know, maybe the next one you’ll like. But comedy, as you well know, if they don’t like your material they don’t like you, they don’t like the way you think. I think also, the world has changed. You got to worry so much about whether someone’s going to get offended, and my show is probably as innocuous as it can get, you know, I’ve always said I was that yellow stripe down the middle of the road, but yet, I just find and I don’t want to waste my energy on worrying about: Is someone going to be offended? Comedy, you’ve got to do it from the heart and for lucky for me that most of that time I’ve had great shows. And people have liked what I did, but it’s time to call it in.

Me: Was that time that you were forced away from the stage in 2020 due to COVID lockdowns, was that what inspired you to start your “Sunday Morning with Bill” videos? Or had you started that before?

Engvall: I had started that before. I had a really strange experience. It was wonderfully strange, and there was when I was on Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing, I played this character Reverend Paul. Hey I played a lot of characters in my career, but this one felt really good and I liked it. And so after about the third or fourth time I’d done it, I have a friend who’s a retired Episcopalian priest, and I said hey do you have any books like theology 101 or Theology for Dummies or whatever. And he said yeah and so he got me these books and I started reading. I thought I really dug theology. Nobody had ever asked me about it, I’d never taken a foray into that field, but I really found the history of the Bible to be fascinating in that, how does a book that’s all about love and caring for each other, also been the source of so many bloody battles and and heated discussions? And I was intrigued by that. And so one night I’d been reading the books, and my wife and I were in bed. She was sound asleep and I was just kind of lay in there and kind of in that nether sleep, you know I wasn’t awake but I wasn’t asleep. And as clear as I’m talking to you, I heard a voice say, now you’re doing what I want you to do. And I enrolled in Grand Canyon University. I just finished getting my Bachelor’s in Christian studies. I’m going to go back and do a course on counseling, and that was what inspired Sunday Mornings with Bill, which I really love doing and it’s amazing the number of people that tune in for it. It’s just a 10-minute little inspirational thing, and I make it very clear to the listeners that this is just what I think. I’m not forcing you to, I’m not trying to get you to change your beliefs or whatever. It’s just what I, how it hits me and how it affects my life. And it’s been very successful. It’s funny, if I miss a week, people go ‘Hey! What happened? I was waiting for you to come on!’ and listen, am I gonna go be a pastor somewhere? Probably not.

NOTE: Bill Engvall currently has more than 1.7 million followers on his Facebook page. His Sept. 12 video posting on FB has 37,000 views as of this writing. His Sept. 5 video, which we talk about later in this conversation, so far has 1,700 comments and more than 69,000 views.

Me: It wouldn’t be the craziest idea, though!

Engvall: Right. It wouldn’t be the craziest idea, but you know you never say never. Who knows what’s gonna come out of this? But I really enjoyed doing it, and I think people, kind of like my stand-up in the sense that when I’m onstage I’m having a good time so I think people watching they go well, if he’s having a good time. I guess I’ll have a good time. And, but it’s been something that kind of came out of the blue and I was more nervous about that because, you know, when it comes to religion and faith and stuff, people get their, they dig their heels in and there was a part of me, I was a little worried about what people would think. But I think because I just speak from the heart and I just tell them what I think, and you’re free to think the way you think, but this is what I think. I think people appreciate that.

Me: Right. You know the thing about the pulpit, too, is, it’s not that different from stand-up comedy, because the preacher gets to have a tight 20-25 minutes every Sunday to monologue.

Engvall: Well, one of the rules I’ve had, I get it from my friend when he was in seminary, he had a professor who said, what you need to do as a pastor is keep it to about 10 minutes and keep it about God. He goes, that’s about all people can take. You know people really, they just want something to start their week off on, you know, something positive and, as you well know, we’ve been inundated with just negative news over the last year and a half, two years, and I think people just want something to hold on to and I hopefully can provide that for them.

Me: Let me, let me take you way back then. Back to maybe the early 90s? Or you tell me. I was reading about. Well first I listened to a podcast with JP (Williams). And then I also read this old New Yorker piece where you talk about how you got involved with with JP and the blue collar thing to begin with and, and you were quoted there saying that you were headed for divorce and alcoholism when JP became your manager that he resurrected you is a pretty heavy term in itself.

Engvall: I think, you know Sean, that’s exactly right. When I was in the clubs I had a drinking problem. And it wasn’t like I was drinking because I enjoyed it. The road is so hard and so lonely. And so what would happen is you would drink just to kill the next day till you had to go to work again. And I tell ya, there was a defining moment in my career and thank the Lord above that I was able to get hold of him because it was not headed for a good end. I was outside of the Columbus Funny Bone, and it was in between shows on a Saturday night and this kid came up and he goes, ‘Hey man I saw you last time you were here,’ and I was like hey thanks for coming back, man. He goes, ‘Are you gonna drink as much as you did last time?’ And I remember thinking, wow, he’s not coming back because he thought I was that funny. And I realized that I had something had to change in my life and I think that was the beginning of my journey towards belief in God was that, if I didn’t change, I was going to lose my family. Eventually my career, and I didn’t want that. And through his faith in me. JP helped me overcome that. I remember, this is where I was in my life. When I signed with JP, the first thing he said was no more drinking on stage. And I was like why? People love it! He goes, what you do after the show is your own business. But during the show, they don’t want to see some good old boy up there getting drunk. There may be a faction of them that do. But in the end, looking back now. Thank God for him because he saw something in me other than a guy that could drink tequila like water.

Me: Yeah, not everybody can be Ron White.

Engvall: No, no.

Me: I certainly can’t. I’ve been sober since 2016 myself so

Engvall: You know what I think I finally had to realize, Sean, is that, and I lost a sister to alcoholism. That was a real wake-up call to me, too. When you think that alcohol is going to solve the problem, that’s when you have a problem. It doesn’t solve your problem, it just masks it for a few hours, and you do things when you’re drinking that you wouldn’t do normally. There’s so many times I can remember being in a hotel room, sitting on my bad looking at the phone, knowing I had to call my wife and she knew. I mean, the minute I said hello, she’d just go ‘Call me tomorrow.’ And I thought, you know, thank God that Gail believed in me more than I believed in me because, plus I battle with depression, so you add alcohol and depression together, it is not a win-win. It’s a bad end. And, you know, I think that’s what saved me was the fact that I had found two people that believed in me and I realized that there was people who believed in me and wanted me to be the Bill they knew, and not this Bill who thought it was the thing to do. Obviously the club owners weren’t going to stop it because you know if I was onstage and I said hey can I get a shot a tequila. All of a sudden, everybody was ordering shots of tequila and, you know that was a cash cow for them,

Me: Yeah, that’s the cruel twist of the comedy business. My drinking buddy back in the day was a guy named Dan Mer. He’s dead now, but he owned the Tempe Improv.

Engvall: I remember Dan.

Me: And he would tell me about which comedians sold the most liquor and he would have them back all the time.

Engvall: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And I don’t blame them. It’s, you know, they’re in the business to make money. But I think that what happens is, comedian aside, you have to be a person, and it’s funny now like when I’m doing a show, if I see somebody usually it happens in a casino or something. I’ll be doing a show, and I’ll see somebody that’s just wasted. And I’m not angry with them. I just feel bad for him. It’s like you’re missing out on something that’s really fun. And you won’t remember it tomorrow. Unfortunately our society is geared towards drinking. I mean you think about, hey, let’s get together and have a cocktail or hey come on over, we’ll have some wine or it’s always something that alcohol is involved in. And I don’t begrudge people their drinking. If you want to drink, great. Every once in a while, I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer or something, but I know now that it’s one. One and done, you know, it’s like I’ll have a glass of wine with my friends and then I’m drinking iced tea or water. But I’m just so lucky, and it goes back before comedy. You know when I was in college I should have been dead four times over. You know, because where we live, where we went to college, it was dry. And so we would have to drive 30 minutes to get booze and it scares me to think about the number of times I drove home like this, you know, just trying to keep (he puts his hands over his eyes and face) And I didn’t kill myself or somebody else

Me: I didn’t mean to quite go down this path but it’s making me think, you know, There are a couple of L.A. comedians who died over the weekend from doing cocaine that was laced with fentanyl, and then we’re losing we’re losing comedians from suicide. We’re losing comedians from COVID. It’s a tragic time for everybody but you know we’re both involved with the comedy business.

Engvall: The reason I think in A) the music industry, and B) the comedy world, is that the road is such a lonely place. You know, I don’t know if I’ve said this earlier, that you know when I’m onstage, I got new best friends, I got 3,000 new best friends, but then they all go home and I’m back at a Holiday Inn for 22 and a half hours, and, you know, it’s not like you can go around and see the town. I don’t know anybody, I don’t know what to go see. And so you find what kills the pain and you think it does but it doesn’t really. And you know what’s funny, is he something you just said, I don’t even look at this as a downer subject. I am so uplifted and happy right now, more so than I’ve ever been in my life. And it’s because I know what’s important now. Back then I didn’t know what was important. You know, my job was just to make people laugh and have a good time and be the party guy. That works for a little while but then after a while, that devil says nope. Now you’re going to pay for dancing with me.

Me: So when you’re working with, with Jeff on his NBC sitcom in the late 90s, and the idea starts bouncing around about your individual tours, joining up to be a combo tour which eventually begat the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, where did you have an expectation of where that would all go?

Engvall: No. JP was the creator of that. The Kings of Comedy (Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and the late Bernie Mac, who wrapped their tour with a concert film that came out in 2000) had gone out and done a tour. And we realized that that was not our demographic but we have a huge demographic. You know, I think we all thought it be successful, but there ended up being Blue Collar dolls for God’s sakes. I mean, that’s insane. One of my favorite stories from the Blue Collar tour and this is really when I knew that it was bigger than we were. We were doing a show in the Midwest somewhere, and we’d all come in from different locales so everybody had a private plane. And for whatever reason the promoter decided to get four limousines, which was silly because you know, we all rode together. But we had the four limousines and we sold out this arena, which is another crazy idea that comedians would sell out an arena. But after the show everybody piled into their respective limousines and we pulled back into the airport, each limo peeled off in front of a private plane. And I looked at Foxworthy and I remember saying, ‘This is as close to rock ‘n’ roll as we’re ever going to get.’ I mean it was, we held the record in Nashville for selling out the Nashville Arena in 24 hours, and held that record until Bon Jovi beat it. Now Bon Jovi and Blue Collar do not go together. You will never hear those two words in the same sentence ever again. But it was a magical thing, and I think the thing that made it so successful was we were so approachable. We did not consider ourselves celebrities. We were just four guys who were on the road together, four friends on the road together. They’re throwing stupid money at you and you’re selling out arenas, I mean how much better does as a comedian does it get?

Me: I don’t know. Dancing with the Stars, maybe?

Engvall: That was an interesting story. When they called I was actually going to turn it down because I thought oh man, is this where my career is at now?

Me: Well that’s my question is like how do you how do you decide like when reality TV is right for you and which one of these competition shows is the one that’s not going to sully your legacy?

Engvall: Well, you know, I give credit to my wife, she’s the one who said, I think you ought to do this. I mean it was 13 million people a week or 20 million people for 13 weeks. I’ll tell you how big it was. After I was on, and while I was on it. When I would do a show and they would say hey from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, there’d be a nice applause, and then Dancing with the Stars, the room would explode. It exposed a lot of people to my comedy that maybe would never have seen it before. And, you know, the reason I got as far as I did on the show was not my dancing ability, trust me. I learned really quickly what it was, it was a popularity contest, and I played to the audience, which is what we do as comedians, and the actors that were on the show were just befuddled, they could not figure out, nor the judges. But you know, I was dancing with this 23-year-old smoking hot British woman. And at the end of the dance, I’d run over and kiss this 55-year-old woman who was my wife and, you know, every woman in America went, ‘See! Look at that.’ And you know, I love my wife. It was an honest, run over and give her a kiss because I was, it was more like oh my god, can you believe it? I got through another week. But I really enjoyed that. It was that was a lot more fun than I thought it’d be. Now there are others…like I got a call to do Celebrity Wife Swap. And I said NO, we’re not doing that.

Me: Gilbert Godfried? Yes. Bill Engvall? No.

Engvall: No. You’ll never see me on Marriage Boot Camp or, you know. I will tell you a funny story though. There was a brief period of time a couple years ago where a lot of people thought I was on The Masked Singer, because… Jenny McCarthy. They were given these clues and she went, ‘oh my god I think it’s Bill Engvall in the banana suit.’ Now how Jenny McCarthy even knew my name was beyond me. And so then my Twitter account blew up and I thought you know what, I’m gonna have some fun with this. So when they asked is that you? I went: I’m not allowed to say yay or nay.

Me: You know in both your sitcom that was on TBS and also Jeff Foxworthy’s show, in both of those, they were both family sitcoms, and you got to work with young actors who became stars: Haley Joel Osment on Jeff’s show and then Jennifer Lawrence played your daughter.

Engvall: I remember when Jenny came in, we gave her first job. And when she came in to audition for the role of my daughter, after she walked out, I looked at the producer, I said, when we had hired her. And I said, But she’s not gonna be with us very long. We’ll be writing that episode where she goes off to college, because Jenny just had, I hate the term, but she had IT. I think that’s why America fell in love with her, because she was kind of like the Blue Collar guys in the sense that she gave the average Joe and Jane a hope that the big things can happen. And Jennifer Lawrence, God bless her heart. After Winter’s Bone and the first Hunger Games…she always mentioned my name and bless her heart, I’ll always owe her for that one.

Me: Was there any advice or counsel that you provided to these kids or was there anything that you saw that showed you how to survive show business?

Engvall: But to the kids. I knew they were young and whether they took it to heart or not I don’t know I hope it stuck with them. But I said you should always come to this set with a smile on your face because you’re making a TV show. You’re not busting rock with a jackhammer. You’re not laying cable. All you’re doing is showing up and they got your coffee the way you want it, I mean for me it was coffee, or whatever you’re drinking, you got your own dressing room. And this is what everybody dreams of. I can remember to the day, when I was standing outside of the studio and my name was on those big doors of The Bill Engvall Show and I thought, I’ve found the Holy Grail, I got there. And I wanted those kids to know, never take this for granted because as quick as it came, it can go away.

Me: You mentioned being on the Blue Collar tour and being able to see yourself as a doll. And it strikes me, whereas Larry the Cable Guy has so much merchandise, and Jeff Foxworthy, lots of merchandise. You never really had a lot of merch. Maybe ‘Here’s Your Sign’? Did you have that?

Engvall: A little bit of stuff but, you know, it was interesting. My demographic was just not a T-shirt, panty, hat buying crowd. And I was fine with that because it’s a pain in the butt to deal with merchandise. But yeah, I kind of came to realize that. And Larry, God love him. He was what the tour needed. We needed that character, that you know he was everybody’s uncle or somebody you knew. And I just had the best time, just because, I remember I would, before every show I’d walk to the center of the stage before anybody came in, and I would just look and just go, these people spent a ton of money to come see this show. Especially when you look back at doing open mic nights, and midnight shows on a Saturday night when they’re too drunk to even know what you’re saying. And here you are in an arena where people have made plans, like I would make plans to go see Elton John or Garth Brooks, or whatever. I mean that’s that’s mind blowing.

Me: For your next gig or your concurrent gig while you’re wrapping up this final stand-up tour, you’re not selling your own merch. You get to sell other people’s merch, with Blue Collar Auction.

Engvall: When that show was pitched to me I immediately said yes, just because it’s kind of like American Pickers meets Barrett Jackson. We sell everything from, auction off everything from cars and trucks to movie memorabilia to antiques, to weird stuff. And the thing I love the most about it is my interaction with with the seller because they’re characters. We had a we had a couple come on that was all dressed in goth. And they looked a little old to be wearing goth, but they brought in this metal box, this black metal box that had windows in it, and inside of it hung the skeletons of two bats. And I was like, ‘Where in the world did you come across this?’ and they say ‘oh we found it at a garage sale few years back, we want to sell it now.’ I said well what are you hoping to get for it. They said, well, we’d like to get $500. I was thinking, well good luck with that. The dumb thing sold for 750 bucks. Who knew there was a bat enthusiast in the bidding? But I like it because you don’t have to be a millionaire to bid on this thing, you know. The plan is, when it premieres there’s going to be a blue collar auction website, and you can go on and bid on items that are right there. And then I, you know, we’ve had Lorenzo Lamas. We had Richard Rawlings, the Gas Monkey guy on. We had Kyle Petty auctioned off some stuff, and that’s what I would love is to get celebrities to come on the show, auction off maybe some of their stuff that they don’t want anymore, because there’s people out there that will buy it.

Me: I’m sure people would buy Larry’s old cut off shirts. They would pay a lot of money for that.

Engvall: It would probably go for a lot of money.

Me: Was there anything you wanted to bid on?

Engvall: Yes, there was two things. One was a Honda 70 trail bike that was one of the first motorcycles I ever owned as a kid, and then they had a 1950 Shasta camper trailer that was in cherry condition that I would have bid on in a heartbeat.

Me: But you probably couldn’t.

Engvall: Nah. They wouldn’t let me.

Me: So I know I should wrap this up. So I want to take it back to your most recent Sunday morning with Bill, which you put up for Sept. 5, 2021, about the parable of the talents. Because you talk about how, you know, you feel like God’s gift to you was the gift of making people laugh. And so I wonder now that you’re starting to embrace the idea of retiring from comedy, what do you see is the talent, or the best way for you to serve, going forward?

Engvall: Wow, Great question. You know what, Sean, I think the honest answer is, and I don’t mean to say this to to sound like a cliche or a cop out, but I literally am just waiting for God to show me what the next chapter is. And I will always try to make people laugh and feel good, whether it’s through Sunday Mornings with Bill, or some other venue, but I just feel like people need levity, and I will continue to do that even just on social media. What the future holds? I don’t know. But I know that like when I do Sunday Morning with Bill I always try to keep it light and maybe have a funny story about that relates to that. Because there was a long time I didn’t know what my talents were. I didn’t know the gifts that God had given me. And I took them for granted. And so, I don’t really know what the next chapter is going to be, but I’ll embrace it and I will always try to make people smile and laugh in their heart.

Me: Well Bill, congratulations on the career you’ve had thus far and thank you for sharing a great conversation with me. I really enjoyed it.

Engvall: Well, Sean, you haven fallen into that category that the best ones go too fast. I really enjoyed this and I hope that we can get a chance to talk again sometime.

Me: Me too.