Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska. Whitney attended college at the now defunct Baptist University of America. Whitney left college after his junior year to pursue his comedy career.
Whitney began his career in
radio. He started as a disc jockey in Blue Springs, Missouri. Whitney became a popular regular guest on many radio shows through out the nation. The development of the character, Larry the Cable Guy, made Whitney famous. Now he maintains the Larry character throughout his stage comedy acts. Whitney is also one of the co-stars of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. The tour is a comedy troupe which also includes Bill Engvall, Ron White, and Jeff Foxworthy. The comedians all starred on Blue Collar TV together.
Whitney has released seven comedy albums as Larry the Cable Guy. His first two albums, Lord, I Apologize (2001), and The Right To Bare Arms (2005), have both been certified gold by the RIAA. Whitney’s third album, Morning Constitutions, and its accompanying TV special were released in 2007. Whitney also gained notoriety as he provided the voice of Mater in the Disney/Pixar films Cars and Cars 2.
Whitney published a book titled Git-R-Done!, Larry the Cable Guy’s catchphrase.
In 2010 the History Channel announced it was preparing a series starring Larry the Cable Guy. The show is titled Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy and it debuted in 2011.
Whitney lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is married to Cara Whitney since 2005. The couple has two children together, a son, Wyatt and a daughter Reagan.
Whitney's standup routine of country rube one-liners is his bread and butter, but he's becoming a box office regular. In 2006, his movie
Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector earned $15.6 million, proving that enough of Whitney's fans would show up at the multiplex for the potty humor and Dale Earnhardt Jr. references they knew from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour to make his films profitable. As the voice of the tow truck character Mater in the Pixar movie
Cars, Whitney was introduced to some other demographics.
Now, in
Delta Farce, Whitney is taking on the war on terror in a trenchant political drama... Oh, who are we kidding? The fart jokes are back, people. This time Larry and his buds, played by fellow Blue Collar alum Bill Engvall and gangly character actor DJ Qualls, are bumbling Army reservists bound for Iraq. "I love what I do and I don't take myself too seriously," says Whitney, 44. "This character is fun. It gives me a chance to take that little bit of me — how I grew up — and magnify it. I could care less about doing a huge drama. Although if someone said, 'I want you to do this part with Angelina Jolie' then maybe."
Whitney, who is the son of a preacher and has been a vocal Bush supporter, has been a lightning rod for critics, who have accused him of racism and homophobia. He's quick to tell me about his gay tour bus driver ("one of my best friends").
Whitney also defends comedians of all political stripes, from fired shock jock Don Imus — "He's has been doing that crap since the beginning of time. Don't draw a line in the sand while a guy is walking over it" — to libertarian Bill Maher — "Don't agree with him, bless his heart. But he's hilarious." Comedians, Whitney says, are like beverages. "Everybody has different taste." (Whitney says he's Coors Light).
The Larry the Cable Guy character has become considerably less political since Whitney created him on the radio as a kind of southern Archie Bunker in the early '90s. "You want the biggest fan base you can get," says Whitney. "There's a lot of comics who just like to make their friends laugh. Audiences like seeing a comedian who doesn't talk to the back of the room. He talks to the front of the room."
Whitney is passing through tinseltown, but he says he has no desire to stay. "I like wide open space. I like the people in small towns. They're friendly. They're genuine. They're not in the business." But there are signs the small town of Hollywood is ready to call Whitney a local. As I leave the comedian so he can take his next meeting, with a director looking to woo him for a project, a crisply suited and apparently ageless Don Johnson, who is lunching nearby, strolls over to say hello. Actually, what Johnson says is: "Git R done!" Larry the Cable Guy's catch phrase. If I didn't know better, I'd think I were at the Ponderosa.
'Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy' Series Premiere
8 February 2011
Antics
Daniel Whitney has made a name for himself over the past decade as Larry the Cable Guy. As popular as his redneck act has been in standup comedy, his only success elsewhere has been his voice work as Mater in Pixar’s
Cars. The movies where he’s been the star (Larry the Cable Guy as
Health Inspector, in
Delta Farce or
Witless Protection) have flopped badly, suggesting he has a limited appeal for broad audiences.
The History Channel, however, is not looking to appeal to a broad audience. The channel has found niches with tangentially history-related shows like
Pawn Stars and
American Pickers and not-very-history-related-at-all nonfiction shows like
Ice Road Truckers and
Ax Men.
Its status as a mid-tier cable network will not be improved with the inclusion of
Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy. If the show draws a good chunk of Larry’s target audience, History will have a minor success on a previously dead programming night (Tuesday). If it doesn’t, the channel doesn’t lose much on the gamble. As for the show itself, well, it’s not very good. And yes, that’s mostly because of the host.
Only in America finds Larry the Cable Guy traveling across the United States in character and talking to various people about (supposedly) interesting stories in American history and more importantly, Americana. Take the cross-country vibe of
American Pickers, throw in a bit of
Pawn Stars’ knuckleheads Corey and Chumlee, and some of the blue collar work ethic of
Dirty Jobs, and you have
Only in America. Unlike the affable Mike Rowe or the enthusiastic Pickers, though, Larry the Cable Guy is not a good host for this type of show. Everything about
Only in America feels lazy and disingenuous.
Each episode features three or four segments in different places, chosen either because they reinforce Larry’s persona or because they’re the polar opposite. In Dawsonville, Georgia, he learns about the history of moonshine and how moonshine running during Prohibition eventually led to NASCAR racing. It would be a fascinating story, but the segment is full of clichés. Larry is blindfolded by modern-day moonshiners so he won’t reveal their location, and then they have him carry a case of the homemade liquor through the forest and out into dirt roads, where he just happens to run into an expert on the cars the old moonshiners drove. Eventually Larry gets around to meeting Dawsonville resident and NASCAR legend Bill Elliott, who takes him out back to do donuts in a souped-up car. And that’s about it. The interesting historical parts of the story take a backseat to Larry’s antics.
In Calveras County, California, setting of the famous Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” we learn the species of frog from the story has almost been driven to extinction by bullfrogs. Larry performs his shtick for a variety of folks, first at the home of some frog-jumping specialists and later at the County Fair. The bit with Larry in the Wisconsin Dells is similar. He and some locals discuss historical stories, but Larry is more concerned with the abundance of mosquitoes than talking to the expert. He spends most of the segment water-skiing and walking around one of the dozens of local water parks.
The polar opposite-style segments are worse. Larry travels to Burlington, Vermont, to discuss etiquette with the descendants of Emily Post. They try their best to explain why rules were in place in the time of Ms. Post, but Larry mostly goofs around. Following etiquette, his hosts laugh weakly at his dated standup material. Larry’s trip to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston could have been interesting, but his fixation on how space toilets operate takes up too much time. Not that bodily functions in space aren’t a worthwhile topic: it’s just better to have a host that’s
actually interested in how these things work than a guy who wants to make poop jokes while his guides look uncomfortable.
The host never seems genuinely interested in the places he visits. Because Larry the Cable Guy is a character and not a real person, his interactions feel calculated. Imagine Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat hosting a show about Eastern European history, and you have a good idea of what
Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy is like.
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