Bitter streak emerges in Carrington’s comedy

Rodney Carrington wears a cowboy hat onstage, but it's the stumpy one I'd call the "sidekick" hat, not the big rodeo cowboy's or Western movie hero's.

It works for him. So does some weight gain, which he attributes — along with a lot of his He-Man Woman Haters Club attitude — to his divorce.

Carrington grins his way through a lot of aggressive comedy because he is our rodeo clown, and has been for every National Finals Rodeo since 2000. Elsewhere at the sprawling MGM Grand, name musical acts (including Craig Wayne Boyd on Friday and Craig Morgan on Saturday) are playing for free, about the same time Carrington goes onstage for a paid ticket.

But Carrington still fills the David Copperfield Theater. He can give those singers a run by channeling a wicked Elvis, doing comedy songs along with stand-up. He also stands apart by doing raunch comedy, instead of the family-to-PG-13 stuff you get from Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy.

But he still delivers it like he is auditioning for "Green Acres": "I'm thinkin' I done done some s--- to you."

So Carrington is happy to play the harmless good ol' boy. At least until he isn't. And that's where it gets confusing, and a little squirmy.

In some ways he's a country version of Andrew Dice Clay (also on the Strip this weekend at the Tropicana's Laugh Factory). They both imitate women with an annoying voice, clueless but entitled.

On this night, Carrington wasted no time singling out which part of a woman he still cares about, and how he "don't care what it's attached to about 95 percent of the time."

Facing the single life after 18 years of marriage, Carrington finds he is faced with a choice between "young and dumb, or old and f---in' crazy."

Yet both he and Clay are working stereotypes — Brooklyn mook, Okie redneck — amped up to a level of ridiculous that tempers the misogyny, giving women in the audience a flak jacket for all the vitriol fired their way. "This guy ain't no prize himself," you can almost hear them thinking.

Carrington reinforces that with plenty of self-targted riffing. It can be a look at God and creationist theory to decide "I'm not my fault," or the embarassing details of a visit to his golf-buddy doctor, and then the Walgreen's drive-thru, when there comes a need for Viagra.

But with Carrington, you're never sure where the act ends and the reality begins. Granted, that's a hallmark of good comedy, and too many stand-up legends are sad clowns inside.

The divorce bitterness rings through enough of the act to make you miss the carefree clown of 10 years ago, and hope the Lexapro works. The wavering tone takes a hard left during his silly-fun song parodies, when he suddenly goes from "Dukes of Hazzard" hayseed to genuine redneck on us.

It starts with a variation of the familiar "Mexicans do the jobs that we won't." Carrington "likes Donald Trump," but "let's be honest: We need these Mexican f---ers." And after paying some steep medical bills for a couple of his hired hands, he'll take a cue from the diary of Anne Frank: "We'll just hide your ass in the basement until this (deportation talk) blows over."

If only it stopped there. "Black lives matter? Black lives need to get to f---in' work."

Not getting quite the laugh he expected and perhaps noticing a bit of stunned reaction, Carrington followed up that he's not there to be politically correct and that primary-state voters need to get their act together. "That's how we ended up with eight years of the motherf---er that's in there."

Then, the clueless female voice: "Let's try the black one."

"Let's f---in' not."

Wow. Yes, this is a niche audience, and came as Trump himself spent NFR week continuing to erase filters that once separated the spoken from the unspoken among his supporters.

And stand-up is the last haven for raw, unfiltered free speech (at least before the Trump campaign). I'll always defend that, so I suppose beyond the casual racism, it was the tone and randomness of it. If you go see Don Rickles or a political comic, you know what to expect going in, and Carrington's fans do too.

But the shift between beer-drinkin' fun and the mean edge, the flux between caricature and details way too specific to be a made-up "bit" — an anecdote about a specific sex act with a drunken woman in her '20s on a hotel balcony at Disney World — leave us as confused about our singing rodeo cowboy as he is about women.

Carrington wraps it all up with his signature frathouse tune "Show Them to Me."

"(T)his whole world's gone crazy, There's too much hate and killin' goin' on ..." he sings. "No one thinks of fightin', when they see a topless girl. Baby, if you would show yours too, we could save the world."

Ten years ago, a happier Carrington would get a few takers to unbutton for the video screen. On this night, just one. Maybe if he was a little nicer — like the Rodney who first sang that stirring anthem — they'd be more willing to oblige.

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.