Success follows the man called “Tater Salad.”

Ron White has several trademarks: The cigars, the scotch on the rocks, the black suits. But it’s another quality that may reflect White best—his sh*t-eating, Southern-bad-boy-made-good grin.

There it is, after he has explained why he’s no longer very involved in the wildly popular Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which helped slingshot his journeyman standup career into the national spotlight. “It’s because of my work ethic,” he says. ‘My grandfather once said, ‘That boy’s got a lot of quit in him.’

“Hell, the things I didn’t quit, I got kicked out of. I got kicked off the high school debate team for saying, ‘Yeah, well f*@% you!’ I thought I had won—the other kid was speechless.”

White is grinning a lot these days, thanks to a series of successes that have secured his spot as a solo star after teaming with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy for the Blue Collar tour and its accompanying movie. A one-hour standup special he filmed in January, You Can’t Fix Stupid, drew 4.5 million viewers for its debut on Comedy Central. The DVD for the show has owned the top spot on the Billboard Comedy Charts for the last nine weeks. This June, his memoir comedy combo Ron “Tater Salad” White: I Had the Right to Remain Silent…But I Didn’t Have the Ability debuted at number 15 on the New York Times bestseller list.

His current 115-stop tour visits Salinas on Sunday, Sept. 10, for shows at 5pm and 8pm.

It is a tribute to White’s storytelling ability and comedic rhythm—regulated by pulls from the stogie and his scotch—that the everyday proves such a rich mine for his brutally astute observational gems. Some of his funniest insights come closest to home. “If I could give advice to the planet—don’t marry for looks alone,” he says on his latest DVD. “In a few years, if Barbara’s boobs start to sag too much, there’s a place you can go where they can lift them right back up where they were, move a nipple wherever you want…if her belly gets too big and she doesn’t want to work it off, you can go and get a tummy tuck. If your eyes go bad, they can give you Lasik…But let me tell you something folks, you can’t fix stupid.”

In I Had the Right, the Texas native turns his attention to his other close companions, with whom he and his wife tour on their bus. Two are Scottish terriers named Birdie and Bogey. “People say, ‘That’s cute. They’re named after your golf game,’” he writes. “I’m like, ‘If they were named after my golf game, they’d be Double Bogey and Where the F*@%Is That Ball Going?’ Which is kind of a long name for a pet.”

Their other dog is an English bulldog named Sluggo, a unique canine who White says addresses him as “Tater.” White says he hides M&Ms in Sluggo’s folded jowls while he’s asleep, and that Sluggo “wakes up in the morning, [and] he’s like ‘Slurp-slop-slurp! It’s going to be a good day, Tater.’”

“Tater” describes other interactions between Sluggo and himself that get stickier. “I stud him out last year for pick of the litter…” White writes. “To make sure it took, I took him down to the veterinarian’s office and had artificial insemination done…that’s where they obtain the semen from Sluggo manually, by hand, and put it in the female dog. And now it don’t take sh*t to get old Sluggo to go to the vet. He loves the place.

“I went down there. The veterinarian had the audacity to say to me, ‘Mr. White, if you’ll just come on back here, we’ll show you how to do this...

“I went, ‘That’s OK...He follows me around too much as it is.’”

RON WHITE performs at Sherwood Hall, 940 N. Main St. in Salinas, Sunday, Sept. 10, at 5pm and 8pm. Tickets are $42.75. 1-800-225-2277 or tickets.com.