There’s nothing better than an easy read. You sit back. Your mind goes. You enter another dimension, one that’s easy to coast through. Plus, according to scientific research, whether you’re reading Shakespeare or Jackie Collins, you’re engaging in the highest activity of the mind, where a multitude of mental faculties are exercising all at once. So, hats off to Bill Engvall! With Alan Eisenstock’s editorial assistance, he’s written Just A Guy: Notes from a Blue Collar Life, a book that you can read in one, two sittings tops. Engvall has no designs on writing a masterpiece. There are no literary pretensions, convoluted sentences or big words. Just a collection of anecdotes that reveal Engvall’s life story and what it means to be a Guy.
Bill Engvall is the main man of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which has been delighting the great unwashed from coast to coast since 2000. In 2006, they got big enough to gross a regular mass audience on their Sirius Satellite Radio show, Blue Collar Radio. Unlike so many entertainers these days, Engvall earned his fame by the sweat of his brow, dropping out of an undistinguished college career to tour classrooms with a down-at-the-heels theater troupe. From there, he went on to spin disco, sing Barry Manilow, and do stand-up in Texas nightclubs, all the while hoarding the nickels and dimes in his tip jar to keep the lights on in his flea-bag apartment. His stand-up, like his writing, thrives on the self-deprecating humor of a guy who knows that he has something sell, even if he’ll never figure out how to split the atom.
But Just a Guy: Notes from a Blue Collar Life begs the question, what’s so 'blue collar’ about Engvall? There’s no mention of factories, unions or double shifts in his boyhood or employment history. He grew up in nice houses in small towns in Arizona and Texas. His dad was a doctor, who raised three daughters and a son with seamless success. Shortly after his parents’ unexpected divorce, Dad went on to marry the most beloved schoolteacher in town. Dad also footed the bill for Engvall’s college years at Southwestern University, which Engvall drank away in a frat house before foregoing a sheepskin for a career in comedy, a far more going concern for him. So, folksy he might be, but blue collar?
Well, okay, Engvall might not be the most blue-collar guy in the bowling alley, but he’s definitely a Guy. What is a Guy? According to Engvall, a Guy is "a person who doesn’t think before he speaks." He goes on to say, "A guy has only three basic needs: eating, sleeping, and sex. That’s it. That’s our whole day." Engvall credits his very survival to the fact that he’s left the heavy thinking to his much more competent wife Gail. From chapters 24 to 46, he gives ample evidence for how her wits have salvaged him out of one self-inflicted mess after another. So, Just A Guy begs another question: Is there any dignity or depth to being a Guy?
Okay, this book is comedy. You’re not supposed to take it seriously. But it still raises some compelling questions. Are all guys the way Engvall says they are? My boyfriend and I had a long talk about this. We both agreed that, the way men have gone about history, many of us deserve to be knocked off our high horses today. But we also discussed how we’ve noticed that today’s straight male seems to feel almost obligated to eat crow and call himself an idiot in front of women. Are Guys just having a healthy laugh at themselves when they do this? Or are books like Just a Guy reflective of a decrease in self-worth among guys today?
As for gay guys: What does Engvall say about them? Not much. To him, a guy is a guy, whichever way he swings or, for that matter, sings. Engvall devotes a whole chapter to how, at the age of 8, he played the drag lead in a smash-hit production of Clementine at his elementary school in Winslow, Texas. In that same chapter, he publicly admits, "I’m a crier. I cry at almost anything." To his credit, he doesn’t think that either of these facets of his biography make him any less a man.
For all its philosophical flaws, Just A Guy is an endearing peak inside an unaffected comic’s life. The first couple dozen chapters deal with how the hi-jinks he pulled as a kid and his hatred of homework helped make him the successful jester he is today. The rest of the book concerns how marriage and fatherhood have helped to both mature and sustain him as he continues to hazard the rough roads of show biz. The chapters are short, sweet, and anecdotal, worth the page-turnings. But, after all is said and done, I still think Engvall - and the rest of us - shouldn’t be so quick to answer the question, "What’s in a Guy?"
