After 42 years of traveling the country to perform standup comedy, Bill Engvall is about to take the stage for the last time in the place he considers home: Utah.
The stand-up comic has made Park City his home, and will perform on New Year’s Eve in Salt Lake City.
When he decided to retire from touring at the end of 2022, he immediately knew he wanted his final performances to be in his adopted home state. “I don’t care how nice you can travel — when you’re on the road by yourself, it takes a lot out of you,” he said. “People see you on stage for 75 to 90 minutes and they think, ‘Oh, what a great life.’ But they don’t see the 22-and-a-half hours you’re sitting in a hotel room.”
That was when he got “indoctrinated into Utah.” Headed for a dinner reservation at Grappa on Main Street in Park City, they decided to stop on the way and get a glass of wine, and he didn’t think much of it. “Now I’m from Texas, where they pretty much sell liquor at a child’s birth,” Engvall said.
People are still surprised to learn he lives in Utah, he said. To be clear, he’s not here full-time — he also has a place in Scottsdale, Arizona, to retreat to during the coldest part of local winters. “I’m at that age where … I don’t need that 5 below stuff,” he said, chuckling. You probably haven’t seen him at the Sundance Film Festival, because he’s a local and he knows to make sure he has “booked it out of town for that.”One of the reasons Engvall values his success, he said, is that it did not come overnight. He performed in clubs and on TV for more than two decades before he hit it big on the first Blue Collar tour. And he never really thought big-time success was in the cards.
“People ask you, ‘How do you know there’s a god?’ And I know that because he didn’t give me fame at 23. Because I would have totally screwed it up so bad. I’d have been in some rehab center,” he said with a laugh. “I think sometimes when you’re that young, you’re not mature enough to appreciate what you got. And I think there’s a real good reason that I wasn’t given this break until I was old enough to be able to handle it.”Engvall is not necessarily retiring from performing altogether.
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