Foxworthy, Cable Guy reunite for 2 nights at Planet Hollywood

Rednecks rule. And not just on “Redneck Island.” They’ve conquered a huge swath of cable TV since Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy first teamed up for a Blue Collar Comedy tour 15 years ago.

“I do believe I was on the front edge of this one,” Foxworthy jokes of the big business that Duck Dynasties, Honey Boo Boos and hillbilly handfishers turned into since he first started telling “You might be a redneck” jokes in 1986.

“I remember when I started it, people were like, ‘Can you use the word redneck? Is it offensive?’ ” he says. “I remember, when I was trying to get that first book published, I was turned down by the first 14 publishers I took it to.”

But now, Foxworthy agrees, “As only television can do, they will beat it to death until you can’t get anything more out of it.”

But this weekend, the Foxworthy/Larry co-bill is a scarce resource. Las Vegas is the place where two divergent paths cross. Foxworthy getting back into stand-up, as Larry (sometimes known as Dan Whitney) gets ready to take a break from it.

“I’m going to take about nine months off from touring next year and write some new stuff and gear up again in late October,” Larry says. “I’m kind of burned out. I never really had taken any time off.”

“I still love what I do. I love stand-up,” he adds. “I’m just trying to balance my career and my family and my life out. When you have kids you think about things differently, so you have different priorities.”

Larry, now 51, says he promised his wife that when he turned 50, he would start to ease back on his schedule of more than 140 stand-up dates per year.

“My main priority now is my kids and my wife, making sure I see a lot of the stuff my kids are doing in school,” he says. “That’s the one thing about being a comedian. Most people who have the regular 9-to-5, at least they get to kiss their kids goodnight.

“When I go on the road I don’t get to see them for three weeks. Then I come home for 10 days and I’m back out for three weeks. It’s a whole different perspective.”

Foxworthy, on the other hand, is now an empty nester. He is getting back into stand-up after several years that prioritized TV work such as “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader.”

His youngest daughter is now 20, and “had never seen me in a little club working on stuff. She was just fascinated by that,” he says of breaking in new material at The Punchline near his home in Atlanta.

“If you put a gun to my head and said I could only do one thing, it would be stand-up,” he adds. Some comedians, he says, are just stand-ups “at their core. And I’m one of those guys. I just missed this.”

Foxworthy, 56, says his past stand-up specials serve as “kind of a snapshot of what was going on in my life.” Now, “being the guy with grown kids and being empty nesters, that’s kind of new ground for me to plow.”

It’s also a reminder that most of Foxworthy’s act is storytelling. “Larry’s much more of a one-liner guy. In fact, when I write a one-liner and have nowhere to put it, I usually call Larry and say, ‘Do you want this joke?’ ”

Ah, but one-liners are what he is known for, as long as they have “redneck” in the tag.

“The thing that was so unique about them, and it didn’t dawn on me until years later, is that they’re one-liners,” he says. “And we live in an age where nobody does one-liners. But being one-liners, they were easy to remember, they were easy to retell and you could do a bunch of them.

“Even at its height, it was five minutes of a two-hour show,” he adds, “but it was something people remembered me by. You could go on the radio and knock out a bunch of them.”

If redneck jokes are Foxworthy’s ticket to immortality, Larry’s is providing the voice of Mater to the “Cars” movies. Two years ago, Disney California Adventure added a $1.1 billion Cars Land with Mater’s name on one of the rides, Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree.

“That is the coolest thing of all time,” he says. He calls it “a big up-yours to the critics who didn’t like ‘Cars.’ ” This seems to bother him: “They liked the first one better after the second one came out,” he says.

Still, he gets more respect for “Cars” than he did when he pretended to be a Larry the Cable Guy impersonator in “Legends in Concert.” It was a stunt he pulled for his History channel show, “Only in America,” three years ago. He says people liked the Elvis guy better but thought Larry “had kind of a goofy walk.”

“It’s the same jokes!” he adds. He just had to work harder to get the laughs. “That’s the thing that’s so crazy.

“Doing something like that, it gives you a greater respect for what you’re doing now. You don’t take it for granted,” he says. “Working the arenas, you have a tendency to let it all go by and not even think about it. ‘This is no big deal.’

“When you go back and do a stage like that, it really gives you a whole different look at what you are doing. You don’t take it for granted and you’re really thankful for it. You could be performing for 12 people a night somewhere.”

In separate phone calls, Foxworthy and Larry both said the part of this weekend’s shows they were most looking forward to was opening them up for audience questions at the end.

When they did it for a benefit in Larry’s home state of Nebraska, “it took me back to the stools on the Blue Collar tour,” Foxworthy said of the part when all the comedians were onstage together.

Some of the questions back then ended up being preloaded on cue cards. Larry promises that this time they won’t be. People can even ask serious questions if they want.

“With 30 years of experience, you usually have something to say about most subjects,” Foxworthy says.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.