BLUE-COLLAR GOLD.

As midnight neared on a brisk February evening in Nashville, America's most popular comedians were celebrating at the bar of the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. They had just brought their Blue Collar Comedy Tour to 18,183 people at the Gaylord Entertainment Center, their largest audience in six years of touring, and the Gaylord's largest ever--exceeding even the night Billy Joel and Elton John came to town together. Puffing on an expensive cigar, one of the comics, Ron White, declared, "We beat that crowd to death."

White, a lowering Texan who wears dark suits and drinks Johnnie Walker Black onstage, wasn't exaggerating much. The four men had had their fans laughing and chugging beer and jumping to their feet to roar at the precision punch lines, such as White's idea of scheduling the execution of Scott Peterson, the convicted wife-killer, for the first morning of daylight-saving time--"Just so I could walk into the cell and go, 'Well, looks like you've got about another hour, Scott. . . . Nope, spring forward, asshole!' " Jeff Foxworthy, a courteous and soft-spoken man of forty-seven, earned a shout for his take on couture: "If your mother still drives you to school, you ain't no gangster--pull your pants up!" And Larry the Cable Guy, the comedian Dan Whitney's alter ego--an endearing rube who wears a cap with a Confederate emblem and flavors his cracker twang with "dad-gum," "underbritches," and "cellularized telephones"--drew hoots when he said, "I'd rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than go swimming with Ted Kennedy any day," and a further storm of applause when he remarked, apropos of nothing in particular, "Waffle House--that's what I like!"

At the bar, the fourth Blue Collar comic, Bill Engvall, was saying, "Wasn't tonight amazing, like chill bumps onstage?" Engvall, a spaniel-eyed Texan who had got big laughs earlier when he acted out trying to hold back a fart while receiving a massage, is the group's enthusiast. He added, "We should keep going--do ten of these a year!" The following month's shows in Washington, D.C., which were to be filmed for a concert movie--the group's third--would be their last; the comedians are now so successful that it is nearly impossible to get them all together. "I love you guys like my family, we are--"

"We are all fucking huge as our own fucking entities," White said. "I sold fifty thousand dollars' worth of Ron White air freshener in the last three months. But together--"

"Together," Foxworthy said, "there's a magic."

Everyone nodded. "We might not be the Beatles," White declared, "but we are at least the Kinks!"

The first two Blue Collar concert movies became, in turn, the highest-rated films ever shown on Comedy Central. Larry the Cable Guy (who was already on his tour bus, heading for a gig in Tampa) has been the country's top touring comedian for the past two and a half years, earning about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a night, with Ron White not far behind. And Jeff Foxworthy, the star of a short-lived mid-nineties sitcom called "The Jeff Foxworthy Show," has, over the course of his career, sold a record fifteen million comedy albums, more than twice as many as Steve Martin and Richard Pryor combined.