While Blue Collar boosted Engvall’s career, it did come with a price, he says. The show was picked up by TBS to become part of its roster of original sitcoms that includes “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.” Not only did TBS broadcast “The Bill Engvall Show” pilot, but the premiere attracted 3.9 million viewers. “When the pilot episode aired” in 2007, he recalls, “I said, ‘This has got to work because this is the first big thing I have done without the guys.’ You don’t want people saying that he’s good, but that he can’t do something without the rest of them.” That must have helped when TBS picked up his sitcom in which he stars as a patriarch of a contemporary middle-class brood. While Foxworthy playfully raised the redneck banner, Larry the Cable Guy caricatured the tubby bumpkin and White seemed to channel Dean Martin, Engvall veered more toward playing the everyman role. I think part of the reason for the ranch is that I want to keep part of Texas in my life.”Įngvall was the more subdued dude of the Blue Collar bunch. “I’m from Texas,” the Galveston native says by phone from his Los Angeles home. (A link to the film trailer is at He’s also been able to get in touch with his inner Gary Cooper by retreating to his Texas ranch. The comedy short is being submitted to film festivals across the country. Along with starring in his TBS sitcom “The Bill Engvall Show,” which was renewed for a third season, Engvall is playing performance halls on a solo national tour that takes him to Flint Center in Cupertino on Saturday.Įngvall also has lived out something of a horse jockey fantasy by starring in the film “Cowboy Dreams,” with character actor Danny Trejo (“Once Upon a Time in Mexico”). Nor does he regret the group’s hit sketch comedy TV series on Comedy Central.īut Engvall, 51, has chosen to leave his posse and ride off to his own successful post-Blue Collar career. It’s not that the comedian didn’t enjoy playing off tour mates Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy and Ron White in one of the most successful comedy tours in history. Bill Engvall’s days with his Blue Collar Comedy compadres are long gone.
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