Deep inside Larry the Cable Guy, there's a guy named Dan Whitney. He neither looks nor sounds like a South Alabama pulpwood hauler, trying not very hard to get out.

Truth be told, Whitney is content to lay back and let Larry hog the glory -- so long as he gets to cash the checks.

Whitney kicked around the comedy-club circuit for years before he first improvised his meal ticket alter ego on a morning-drive radio show in Tampa, Fla.

"When I first started, I did it just for fun," the Nebraska-born, Florida-raised Whitney said in a telephone interview. "My buddy had a morning show. I wanted to help him out. He said he needed some characters. I started calling the radio station and pretended to be a cable guy" and complained about local politics and the like. "It got popular."

Pretty soon, Whitney was being asked to call stations in other cities in the guise of Larry, the unapologetically crass good ol' boy. They weren't paying him squat, though, and it was a hassle to phone from wherever he was on the road doing his stand-up act (with no accent, no sideburns, and pleated khaki pants, no less). He was about ready to chuck the whole bit when he got a booking at McCurdy's Comedy Theater in Sarasota, Fla.

"It was either late'95, early'96," Whitney said. "Les McCurdy billed me as 'Dan Whitney, aka Larry the Cable Guy,' and when I showed up, it was sold out. I went onstage and started doing my act, and people started yelling my catchphrase: "Git-r-donnnnne!" They were yelling for Larry, so I started doing my act as Larry. I did it for about 10 minutes."

McCurdy asked Whitney if he could do his second set of the night entirely as Larry. Whitney said sure, fine, "But let me go change. There was no sense dressing up if I was gonna play, you know, a dirt bag." So he went out to his car and put back on the clothes he'd driven to the gig in: faded jeans, baseball cap, lace-up Ropers and an old T-shirt with the sleeves cut out.

The rest, as Larry would say, is "hiss-tree." Bigger clubs. The Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall. "Blue Collar TV" on The WB. State fairs. Sports arenas. Concert CDs and DVDs. Movies such as "Delta Farce," "Witless Protection." Voice-overs for Disney. Next thing you know, Whitney's socking it away like Jed Clampett.

Still, he said, headlining at venues like New York's Nassau Coliseum means a lot to him. Back in his club-slogging days, he kept track of stand-ups he idolized, comics such as Steve Martin and Andrew "Dice" Clay, and he got a sense of what the big-deal gigs were.

"Nassau is a legendary venue," he said. "Steve Martin did 45,000 people. Obviously I won't do 45,000 people. I think he did three sellouts. But just the fact that I'm able to book the Nassau Coliseum, regardless of how many people come, is, to me, a pretty fun accomplishment."

He isn't nervous about it, though. "The arenas now are old hat," he said. "I know how to work 'em, and they're fun to work. The only thing you worry about is, you just don't want to disappoint the fans that come out to see you. I want to make sure they go, 'Wow, we got what we paid for. We got our money's worth.'"