Ron Shock’s a stand-up guy now, but road was bumpy

By Jerry Fink

Friday, July 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It’s a long road from felon to funny man but it’s a journey comedian Ron Shock would not have missed.

“It has been a wonderful life for me. It’s just been a blessing,” says Shock, who’s lived in Las Vegas since 2000. “I can’t say I would have done it any other way. I have no regrets. I like what I do. I love this town.”

Shock, who performs at the Tropicana through Sunday, draws his routines from his life.

“Each piece I tell stands on its own and then it all ties together,” the 65-year-old says. “It segues from story to story and then I wrap it up — like three-piece movements in a symphony.”

His slow drawl pegs him as a native of the Southwest. He was born in Albuquerque and raised in cities such as Amarillo, Texas, and Oklahoma City. His father was a traveling salesman, his mother a staunch Catholic who couldn’t handle her rebellious son. At 15, he ran away for good and landed in New Orleans, where he became adept at burglary and car theft.

“The more I got into it the more I liked it, the thrill of it,” Shock says. “I was an adrenaline junkie. Maybe I still am. Comedy is the only thing I’ve found since that time that gives me the rush that that did. I was quite wild.”

He was arrested in a car theft and spent nine months in parish prison, the Louisiana equivalent of county jail.

“Fortunately for me, or unfortunately, they made me an editor of the Parish Prison Pelican,” Shock says. “I could read and write and I had a way with words.”

An inmate artist worked on the paper with him. “He could draw really well, almost like a photograph, especially of people,” he says.

They produced a book of pornography, which they printed on the newspaper press and sold surreptitiously to inmates.

“When I got out Dad came down to pick me up and he said, ‘I hope you learned a lesson,’ ” he says. “I had like $2,000 in my pocket, which was a fortune in 1958. ‘Yeah, Dad, it really did it for me. Let’s go eat. I’ll pay. Let’s go to Antoine’s.’ ”

After a two-year stint in the Army, Shock headed for California, where he was arrested on burglary charges.

His three years in real prison were a wake-up call, he says. He returned to his parents’ home in Oklahoma City and became an encyclopedia salesman.

“I had a knack for sales. I was a wunderkind. I loved books. I read a tremendous amount in the penitentiary,” he says. “They don’t care if you have a college degree or you’re an ex-con, as long as you can produce and make them money.”

He became a national sales trainer and vice president in charge of sales for a publishing company. He started a book distributing company in Sydney, Australia. He eventually moved his family to Houston, where he enrolled in college and took a theater course.

He was doing a skit in class when he was spotted by Hayden Rorke, who played the psychiatrist on the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie.”

“He takes me to lunch and out of the clear blue sky said I should be a stand-up comic,” Shock says.

So Shock tried performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston and bombed.

“As God is my witness, it was like a light shone on me when I walked in there,” he says. “I went home and told my wife and kids I was going to be a stand-up comic.”

He spent several years learning his craft. He was headlining the bigger clubs across the country by 1986.

Shock quit for a few years to take care of his wife, who was critically injured in a car wreck. He moved to Las Vegas after she died.

Shock has remarried and now divides his time between comedy and cards. His game is Texas hold ’em.

“I play every day when I’m home and not working,” he says. “When I’m performing, I don’t play at all. I have a routine I go through on the days that I work and I don’t want to divert from that. The performance is everything. But if I’m not working you can find me at the poker tables at Mandalay Bay.”