Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Randall Reeder Channels Will Rogers At Writer’s Conference

By Carol Mell, 4-24-07

	Randall Reeder has been channeling Will Rogers for ten years after an Oklahoman told him he looked and sounded just like the real thing.

What makes for funny? That was my question as I attended my first writer’s conference, this one named for Will Rogers and held in his home state, Oklahoma.

We heard speeches by real Cowboys with hats and real Indians that looked about as native as my Aunt Merle’s teacups.

The workshop asked a different question—what makes for publishable? Then, what makes for sales? For writers I guess these ugly questions keep popping up like a rat in the bathtub.

For lack of a good sales pitch and the will to use it, I paid attention to the Will Rogers impersonators, a very popular gig in the Sooner state where you’ll even find Rogers memorials in bathroom stalls. Those folks know how to sell their native son. 

Randall Reeder has channeled Rogers for a decade. He wore a crumpled hat, saddlebag and rope over his shoulder and was the spitting image of the Rogers I’d seen in a biography by Richard Ketchum. Rogers, it turns out, was a huge star of stage, radio, newspapers and screen. When he died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935, he was the top box office draw. After he died, Shirley Temple got his old job.

I didn’t know Rogers started out doing rope tricks for Wild West shows. During his decade with the Ziegfeld Follies he began commenting on the daily news whenever a rope trick failed until his act became more talk than rope.

Quotes from Rogers’ newspaper writings still ring fresh.

“The Budget is a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, and then tries to reach in and pull real beans out.”

Reeder, who hangs on to his day job as an agricultural engineer at Ohio State, combs the dailies for material just as Rogers did.

“Acting? Heavens, no,” Reeder said, “but I’ve been a member of the National Speakers Association for years.  I was at our annual convention in 1996 when a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Dale Minnick from Oklahoma.”

According to Reeder, the first words out of Minnick’s mouth were, ‘You gotta be Will Rogers.’

Minnick thought Reeder even sounded like Will.

“He kept on me,” Reeder said. “He wrote, ‘God put you on earth to keep alive the spirit of the greatest man of the 20th century.’ He invited me to spend a week in Claremore at the Rogers Memorial. After a day at the museum everyone assumed I must be related to Will.”

Reeder plays Rogers as if he were alive today, 127 years old.

“I always include historic quotes. I use about three quarters Roger’s stuff but I’ll comment on things today, like I wrote about the death of Anna Nicole and how actresses were lining up for transplants.”

Reeder always gets attention when he comes to Oklahoma though children often don’t know who he’s supposed to be. 

“On my last trip to Tulsa, there was this young mom with three kids. I just glanced over and saw that they were really looking at me.

“Are you a Texan?” one little boy asked.

“I asked, ‘Now, who do you know who’s famous from Texas?’”

“Are you Tom Coburn?”

“Now, I don’t object to being called a Texan but being called a Senator, that’s another thing.”

Those who remember Rogers voice are few but thanks to his writings his words live on. I’ve used some of them myself and gleaned a little about what makes a funny.

• Observation
  “I belong to no organized party. I’m a Democrat.”

• Truth
  “When you get into trouble five thousand miles from home you’ve got to have been looking for it.”

• Freshness
  “ Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously, and the politicians as a joke, when it used to be vice versa.”

• Individuality
  “They may call me a rube and a hick, but I’d a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.’

• Current Events
  “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”
  

I wonder how Will Roger’s homespun humor would hold up in a microfiber age?  Many of today’s comics deal in anger. Yet, I have often thought that anger is at the root of most comedy. Using emotional jiu-jitsu, the comic disarms us before we can attack. That might have been Will Rogers Cherokee side, the side that said, “my ancestors didn’t come on the Mayflower but they met the boat.”

Back at the writers conference I learned about wrangling speaking gigs, rustling customers and tying up contracts but it was Rogers who taught me about success.

“When you are satisfied, you are successful. For that’s all there is to success is satisfaction.”

All I need now is a rope trick. 

Randall Reeder has his own website at Will Rogers Today

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