Raunchy Ron White Keeps Rialto Laughing All Night

JOLIET, IL — If you were in the mood to hear lots of jokes about sex, swingers, Mother Teresa, bed-wetting escapades and the late Princess Diana, then you would have been in the right place on Friday night at downtown Joliet's Rialto Square Theatre.

Texas comedian Ron White, one of the country's best known stand-up comics, performed in front of a 7 p.m. sellout crowd of more than 1,900 guests and then returned for a 10 p.m. show in front of at least 1,300 paid attendees, the Rialto's ushers told me.

White is 63. The Rialto's audience tends to be around 53. For the 10 p.m. show, White appealed to a much younger demographic. Most of his crowd looked between 30 and 50. An unannounced opening act got the crowd loosened up.

By 10:20 p.m. White strolled on the stage wearing a suit. He brought along a small glass and a bottle of vintage tequila, a tequila he made sure to promote at the end of his show.

White is a commanding presence on the stage. He has his routine and sticks to it, and nobody in the audience is going to mess with that. About 15 minutes into his second Rialto show, someone sitting in the first five rows was a little too exuberant. The man yelled something, and White immediately put the man in his place and made sure everyone in the crowd knew that they needed to be quiet while he did his routine.

The man seated toward the front also got a quick visit from White's security team, who spoke with him briefly, but allowed him to stay. The man, and the rest of the audience, got the message and everything stayed on point for the remainder of the show.

One of White's opening stories had the crowd roaring with laughs over the course of several minutes. It was a story about swallowing one of his upper front crowned teeth. And this happened on the verge of one of his major shows. To fly home to his dentist and have emergency surgery, would have cost about $5,000, White reckoned.

He went with a less expensive alternative: choosing to use a strainer to catch the crown from going into the toilet. "I took every laxative ... Day two, my legs are numb, I'm watching pornography." Finally, the crown came out, White said he put it in his mouth and had a s*** eating grin."

The audience also learned from White that he has a son, and he bought him a house so he would "quit staring at me waiting for me to die."

On the subject of dreams, White said he kept having a recurring weird dream with Mother Teresa talking to God about Princess Diana, wondering why the late princess had a halo over her head while Mother Teresa did not have one.

"That's not a halo, it's a steering wheel," White told everyone.

White's joke drew laughter, but he realized that not everyone at the late show was laughing with the joke. It was not his joke though, White told them. "It's God's joke .... Too soon? It's 21 years. The gloves are off."

On the topic of sexuality, White told his downtown Joliet audience that he is not gay. "I thought about being gay once, but when it became my turn, I changed my mind," he said.

When White was a child, "I was a bed-wetter." At age 11, he thought he had stopped wetting the bed, so he went to a sleepover with two other neighborhood friends. Sure enough, during the middle of the night, he wet himself, White told everyone. To avoid being an outcast, he went up to one of the other sleeping boys and urinated all over the other boy's blankets, a secret White said he kept for more than 40 years.

White kept his crowd erupting in laughter for slightly more than an hour's time. Before calling it a night at 11:23 p.m., he told everyone that he was drinking Taters Tequila, and he urged them to visit his website to buy his tequila.

White told the Rialto crowd that somebody once complained he should not be using his comic shows to promote his tequila brands to which he told the person, "F*** yourself."