Law enforcement is a serious business. Except when it isn’t.
Dan Whitehurst, who grew up in Camden and graduated from Camden Central High School in 1980, knows all about that. He’s a former officer with the Metro Nashville Police Department who has turned to a life of comedy.
He’s the opening act for Southern funny man Killer Beaz, who will be performing at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Krider Performing Arts Center in Paris.
Whitehurst is excited about being back in the area where he spent his formative years.
“Camden’s always gonna be my hometown,” he said. “I used to work at Emerson Electric in Paris when I lived in Camden. I even had my first date at the Captain D’s in Paris. I had never even eaten out until then, because my parents were real conservative with their money.
“I had never had shrimp before until that first date at Captain D’s. I ate the tails, and one of the friends with us said he’d never seen anyone eat the tails before, so I guess I gave away the fact I wasn’t used to eating out.”
He became a police officer in Nashville, staying with that until he had to retire because of arthritis a little more than 15 years ago.
CATCHING THE COMEDY BUG
He had already gotten into comedy by then, anyway.
“I had wanted to be a writer, but I would get to a certain point and get discouraged,” Whitehurst said.
In 1998, he went to an open mic night, trying to get someone among the prospective comics to use his material.
“I didn’t want to be on stage, I just wanted to write,” he said. “But no one there would use my stuff — they all want to use their own stuff. So I decided to go ahead and get up there and do it myself. And I had a pretty good set. And it feels so good when you have a good set.”
At one point, he entered a contest sponsored by WKDF radio in Nashville, which had 35 comics competing, which each having only two minutes for their act.
“I didn’t have a lot of material, but I had a good two minutes,” Whitehurst said, remembering how he won the contest.
He has turned his talents into a long-term career now. Most of his shows are in spots like Missouri, Florida and Georgia, meaning a lot of travel from his Mount Juliet home. So he noted “Paris will be a close show for me.”
His style on stage would best be described as “storytelling.”
“My first few years, I was a one-liner with a punch line guy, but Ralphie May (a noted Southern comedian who died in 2017) told me I was leaving a lot of meat on the bone and that I should try telling funny stories,” Whitehurst said.
He has plenty of those, many of them from his days as a cop.
“And on most of those stories, I don’t even have to add anything to them — I can just tell them exactly as they happened, and they’re funny.”
Tickets to Saturday’s show in Paris are $55 for VIP seats, with a 6 p.m. meet-and-greet. They’re $33 for preferred seating and $27 for standard seating.