Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
This whole country's just like my flock of sheep! Hillbillies, hausfraus - everybody that's got to jump when someone else blows a whistle! They're mine! - ‘Lonesome' Rhodes
in A Face in the Crowd
It would be hard to argue that Frane Selaks is not the luckiest man in the world. The world first heard of him when the 75-year-old man bought his first lottery ticket and promptly won roughly $1.46 million. His winning led an Australian company, Smith’s Snackfood, to sign him to do a commercial for Doritos. Still, people win the lottery every day, what makes him so special? Known as “Lucky” to his friends, he has cheated death seven times. In 1962, while traveling by train, his locomotive jumped the tracks and plunged into an icy river. Seventeen of his fellow passengers died, but Selaks, with a broken arm and suffering from hypothermia, was able to pull himself onto the riverbank. Less than twelve months later, the door of the DC-8 he was flying in blew open sucking 19 fellow passengers and Selaks out to their sure death. Fate stepped in again, and Selaks somehow escaped the Grim Reaper by landing on a haystack, resulting in a few cuts and bruises. Three years later, Selaks decided to play it safe by taking a bus. Something went wrong and the bus plunged into a river, four died, but Mr. Selaks was able to swim to safety again. In 1970, his moving car somehow caught fire. Yet, he was able to leap out the door to safety seconds before the fuel tank exploded. Three years later, he had more car trouble that resulted in him losing most of his hair. It seems that his fuel pump malfunctioned, spewing gasoline all over the engine, resulting in flames coming through the air vents of the car right into poor Frane’s face. The old man’s lucky streak would continue for another 22 years when he was walking down the street and was hit by a bus in 1995. Dusting himself off with minor injuries, the old man decided to take a vacation in the mountains a year later, rounding a bend in his car, he found himself face-to-face with a big truck. Selaks turned the wheel, sending the car careening off the shoulder, and over the edge. The retirement aged man jumped out of his vehicle, landed in a nearby tree, watching his car explode a few feet below him. Don’t think Frane is the luckiest man in the world? If you happen to meet the old man, I am sure he will introduce you to his fourth wife who is 20 years his junior.
Still, if Frane Selaks is the luckiest man in the world, the second luckiest has to be Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known to the world as Larry the Cable Guy. The Nebraska native and minister’s son gets to go home every evening and roll in big piles of money thanks to three little words, “Git-R-Done.” The catch phrase is on everything from shot glasses to women’s thongs to mud flaps. While Larry has never been in the league of the likes of Lewis Black, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, or George Carlin when it comes to being funny, much like Jimmy Buffett and Kevin Smith, Larry has cultivated a cult-like following and then picked their pockets like a pro, much like George W. Bush and Pat Robertson. I stand in admiration to his ‘Lonesome' Rhodes, I am one of the great unwashed routines. You just don’t notice the big house I live in as I talk down to you in between calls to my agent and stockbroker. Git-R-Done. I am not saying Larry is not funny. I learned in 2nd grade that a good bodily humor joke kills every time. In an era where rich elitists backed by big corporations become richer elitists by banishing other “milk can” elitists, Larry is king. The awe shucks, I love Lee Greenwood, NASCAR, guns, and Jesus, do you want to hear another fart joke and listen to me make fun of gays, blacks, and limousine liberals who see middle America as fly over country? Shtick is like shooting fish in a barrel. Just don’t pay attention to the fact that Larry was raised in the Midwest and attended a private school, not the South like he likes to pretend and has openly admitted that he will dumb things down and purposefully commit grammatical errors to ‘Larry’ things up. He freely admits his speech patterns are all an act, that, "I can pop in and out of it pretty much whenever I want." Translation, Larry is playing the rubes and has been doing such since he worked for a Florida radio station attacking Commies and reading fictitious letters from Confederate soldiers who got their peckers shot off in the Noble Cause. How about a “Git R Done” talking lighter? A case of 48 of them is only $149.99. A Larry the Cable Guy Talking Doll, special to you, marked down to $17.98. The doll says all of those funny expressions that only a Southern boy would say, like “Tell you what,” “I don’t care who you are that’s funny right there,” and of course “Git-R-Done.” Again, I am not saying this out of meanness. I wish I could play a redneck for millions of dollars instead of perfecting the jackass redneck role in my personal life for free.
There are movies that I don’t even know why critics bother to review. Critics are going to hammer them and audiences are going to go to them anyhow. A Larry the Cable Guy movie could get a zero on the rotten tomatoes scale. Lambasted by every major critic in America, and the sidewalk in front of the megaplex showing it will still be stained with tobacco juice and its parking lot filled with trucks with bumper stickers proudly proclaiming, “I don’t do fat chicks.” You see, Larry is one of them, especially if they have bought the Boxed Set of 2 Git-R-Done Travel Mugs only $24.99. In this movie, Larry has changed professions. He is now a health inspector. Now here is the funny part, he inspects fancy restaurants. Larry in high society, oh the humor abounds. Not since Jed Clampett bought the movie studio and put Jethro in charge has anything been so ripe for laughs. Of course, our hero has trouble with the system and has to go undercover to discover the real villains. It makes you wonder why his cd, A Very Larry Christmas, now only $13.99, and the short-lived “Blue Collar TV,” volume #1, also $13.99, and volume #2, $17.99, clean fun for the entire family, failed.
The redneck comedian spinning his common sense wisdom has always been a part of American culture. The likes of Will Rogers, Andy Griffith, and Mark Twain have donned the clothes of the hick, taken on a anti-intellectual guise, the homespun philosopher, but underneath it all, audiences knew these men were intelligent and challenged their listener’s world view. They did not demean their fans, rather subverted them with humor. Does Larry do this or does he just pat them on the head as he is picking their pocket? In a time of entire news networks, talk radio around the clock, and angry white ministers lashing out at PC paper tigers and Judas goats, and repeating how their listeners are the chosen ones, Larry is in the right place at the right time. The stars have all aligned. There is a reason he is America's highest-grossing road comedian last year, and not just because he makes a darn good trailer hitch for only $13.99. Git-R-Done.
Verdict: Who cares? People who will go to this movie would Not Read this Column.