Saturday, April 25, 2009
Ron White: Behavioral Problems
Review by Sombrero Grande
Recently my wife and I have been on a kick of watching stand up comedy DVDs--any we can get our hands on from a wide variety of comics with wildly disparate comedic styles. To our surprise, one we enjoyed a lot more than we were expecting was the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, and of the four comics featured on that DVD, the one that made us laugh the most was chain-smoking, scotch-drinking Ron White. We've since watched his two subsequent stand-up DVDs, They Call Me "Tater Salad" and You Can't Fix Stupid, and just picked up his latest release, Behavioral Problems.
Here's the bottom line on Behavioral Problems: it's very funny and it's very, very vulgar. In fact it feels far more vulgar than both of his previous stand-up DVDs put together. White sets the tone with his first joke about a fake reality show entitled "Pimp My Muff" and from there the topics head to all manner of shockingly frank sexual discussions.
One of the things I enjoy most about watching Ron White perform is that his "I don't give a shit as long as it's funny" attitude allows him to do absolutely nothing to hide any behaviors that would be embarrassing for another celebrity to admit to. Not only is he constantly and unapologetically lighting up, puffing on a cigar and pouring himself scotch after scotch while on stage, but he unashamedly discusses the fact he gets pedicures and carries a man-purse in everyday life. He even brings out his two adorable little dogs to meet the audience at the conclusion of his performance. White tells it like it is, all the while standing with his cigar, posed like a General overseeing a battle his men are winning and devilishly smiling like a elementary school kid who just got away with flagrantly cheating on an exam.
His near-constant drinking onstage produces some unintentional slips of the tongue during this DVD, such as saying "peaches" instead of "pizza" and "UFO tour" instead of "USO tour," but White gleefully points them out and elaborates on them as he becomes more and more inebriated.
The "Bonus Material" on the DVD consists of four segments that "didn't make the cut" for the main portion of the DVD, perhaps because they contain even more explicit material such as lengthy simulations of hand-jobs, blow-jobs and gay sex techniques depicted in Brokeback Mountain.
The last bonus segment, playfully entitled "I Already Had This Erection" breaks from the stand-up to put White in a theatrically-lit bar, telling a few stories "after the show" to the phoniest bunch of onlookers since the studio audience of America's Funniest Home Videos. In numerous cut-aways, these people look like they're pissing in their pants laughing at every word White utters. The segment comes across as staged (the viewer honestly cannot tell if the other folks at the bar are actors or merely average people really hamming it up for the camera) and runs in stark contrast to White's usual routine of telling it like it is, chain-smoking warts and all, making it easy to see why this segment didn't make the cut into the main part of the DVD.
Ron White's Behavioral Problems is a really vular, raunchy, unrated, uncensored DVD of stand-up comedy, but if you can stomach it, you're likely to do an awful lot of laughing.
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