Comic Bill Engvall’s shows to benefit Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Southwest Washington

The main thing Bill Engvall laughs at, it seems, is himself.

That’s what the Grammy nominee, part of the ultra-successful Blue Collar Comedy Tour, will be doing during two shows Sunday in Rochester.

Admirably enough, he can laugh about his painful experience competing on “Dancing With the Stars” two years ago. He danced for 13 weeks and made it to the finals.

“I don’t think people realize how brutal it is,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I tore my groin; I pulled my hamstring; I had to have my knee replaced when it was all over; and I lost 35 pounds.”

He danced six hours a day every day for those 13 weeks. It’s no wonder he lost weight.

“As I tell my audience, I’m 58,” he said. “We’re not designed at 58 to dance 13 weeks, six hours a day, seven days a week.

“We’re designed to dance once a year, drunk at a wedding to Kool and the Gang.”

The humor of getting older is a primary focus of his current act and his upcoming special “Just Sell Him for Parts,” filmed last month and due out next year.

“The people who are seeing the shows are going to get kind of a sneak preview,” he said.

If Engvall keeps a good sense of humor about himself, the people closest to him have to do the same.

His act has evolved over the years, he said, in part because his kids grew up. “When kids do stuff and they’re 2 and 3 years old, it’s cute. But when they do it and they’re 29 and 24, you really don’t find it that cute anymore,” he said.

Jokes about marriage, though, have remained a staple.

“I’ve been married now for 21 years,” he joked in a show back in 2003. “If you had a job for 21 years, you’d know that job inside and out, backwards and forwards, wouldn’t you?

“I can honestly stand here tonight and tell you that after 21 years of marriage, I know no more about women than I knew the day I got interested in them.”

Although he — and men in general — are the butt of many of the jokes, women don’t escape unscathed.

Does wife Gail Engvall — to whom he’s now been married for nearly 33 years — ever ask him to knock it off?

“She only asked me not to do one joke,” he said, “and it wasn’t even the joke. It was just the voice I used. She said, ‘Just change the voice, because people look at me like, ‘Oh, there’s that woman with the awful voice.’”

“She enjoys the perks of the business, too,” he said.

Engvall doesn’t joke about politics, and he keeps his act family-friendly, he said.

He also generally hesitates to joke about the places where he performs.

“Sometimes if you make jokes about where people live, they kind of look at you like, ‘You don’t live here; you don’t know anything about this.’ ”

But that doesn’t mean he can’t come up with a good line about the Northwest weather.

His daughter Emily graduated from the University of Puget Sound, and he remembers well visiting it with her when she was choosing a college.

“When she told me, ‘I want to go look at University of Puget Sound,’ I said, ‘Well, sweetie, I think it rains a lot up there,’ ” he said. “She said, ‘Well, let’s go look at it.’

“We went up there, and it was like God had kissed the day. It was 80 degrees and sunshiny, and the kids were on the quad throwing a Frisbee. And she goes, ‘I think I’m going to go here.’

“She called me three weeks into school, and she goes, ‘It hasn’t stopped raining yet,’ ” he said. “I don’t know if UPS has some connection with the Supreme Being or not.”

This story was originally published September 2, 2015 at 8:00 PM with the headline "Comic Bill Engvall’s shows to benefit Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Southwest Washington."