LOS ANGELES — Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall don't want to be hip. They don't want to be happenin'. They don't care about pushing the envelope.
In their stand-up acts and their new WB show, "Blue Collar TV," what these guys really want to be is funny. The show airs tonight at 7 p.m. on Ch. 30.
"We never tried to be cutting-edge," Foxworthy said. "We talked about things that made us laugh, and we have very similar sense of humor. And then when we met with (producers) Adam (Small) and Fax (Bahr), theirs was the same. We said, 'You know what? Let's just do what's funny.'
"I've always felt like all I ever wanted to do was make people laugh."
"If it's funny, I'll do it," Larry said. "It's all about being funny. We're not trying to change the world. We want to make people laugh."
If you've seen their stand-up acts or the movie "Blue Collar Comedy Tour," you know that these are some of the funniest guys on the planet.
"We just decided, 'You know what? We're going to talk to the everyday guy and talk about things that make us laugh,' " Foxworthy said. "We intended on doing the Blue Collar Tour for four months and ended up doing it for over three years."
The trick is translating that into a half-hour comedy that is, in many ways, a throwback to television days of yore — sort of a half-hour variety show that's kind of a cross between "Sonny & Cher" and "Hee Haw."
"Basically, the theme was set when these guys came to us and said, 'We just want to be funny. We don't want to reinvent the wheel,' " said executive producer Adam Small. "I think this is the first show where the three stars had to take a paycut to get their own network show. They don't care about anything other than having fun and making a fun show."
Taped in a large theater in Atlanta, the format for "Blue Collar TV" is pretty simple: Foxworthy comes out and tells a couple of jokes; a few big, broad sketches populated by over-the-top exaggerations of Southern characters follow; the guys tell a few jokes to close the show.
"We were shooting before 700 people a night and turning 400 or 500 people away every night," Foxworthy said. "We were doing this thing three hours a night and, at the end of the night, getting a full-room standing ovation. I've never seen anything like it in television."
"Of course, the free buffet and lottery give-away helped out," Larry said.
Don't get the idea that you have to be from the South — that you have to be a redneck — to appreciate their humor.
"Funny is funny. I mean, 'Seinfeld' worked in Alabama because Jerry was funny. And Jerry never gets labeled 'the Northern comedy of Jerry Seinfeld,' " Foxworthy said. "Because I've got this accent, everything is always the Southern comedy. I love the South. That's where I live. I don't want to live anywhere else, but I just think I'm a comedian."
Like stand-up, sketch comedy is sort of hit-and-miss. There are some very funny bits in Thursday's premiere and others that don't work as well. But the stars certainly seem to be having fun, and their enthusiasm is infectious.
Given what turned out to be a rather unhappy experience with his sitcom "The Jeff Foxworthy Show" (in which Engvall co-starred), Foxworthy went into this with some trepidation.
"We didn't know if we could do sketch," he said. "I love doing sketch. I thought I didn't like acting because I always had to be Jeff Foxworthy. And with this, I can go in and say, 'I want to be 300 pounds and bald and have a weird accent.' And they say, 'Great, let's try it.' This has honestly been a ball for me."
"The only thing is they kind of had to tone me down a little bit because I'm a lot funnier than the other guys, so they wanted to make sure that we were at an equal basis," Larry said.
WHERE'S RON WHITE? Fans of the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" may wonder why Ron White (the fourth stand-up comedian in the movie) isn't in "Blue Collar TV." Turns out when they were developing "Blue Collar TV," White was developing a show at another network (a project that failed to get on the air).
He'll show up in at least a couple episodes of "Blue Collar TV," but he has another reason for not appearing full-time.
"For the first time in his life, because of the movie, Ron's making really good money on the road doing stand-up," Foxworthy said. "And he didn't want to give that up."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com