WE ARE in a heaving Texas bar somewhere west of San Antonio, surrounded by men with long moustaches stamping their feet and shouting “Yee haw”.

It is the sort of place where people traditionally smash chairs over one another’s heads at the end of the evening. On stage is a cigar-chewing Jewish cowboy in a black Stetson who wants to be the next Governor of Texas; beside him is an enormous, bald former wrestler who was the Governor of Minnesota.

“Ah got a definition of ‘politics’,” shouts the cowboy. “Poli — that means more than one — and ticks — those are blood-sucking parasites.”

“Kinky . . . Kinky . . . Kinky,” the crowd chants. The wrestler flexes his biceps and growls. The country and western music cranks up another notch, and any moment now, you feel, people are going to fly out of the saloon swing doors and land in the street.

Meet Kinky Friedman, cowboy, conservative, musician, crime novelist and comic, who is running an independent campaign for the governorship fuelled by off-colour jokes, homespun prairie wisdom, resentment of the established parties, strong language, stronger liquor and donations from a shampoo millionaire.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the Friedman campaign is that it might, just conceivably, succeed.

George Bush Jr was also an outside bet when he won the Texas governorship in 1994 and Mr Friedman, running as a “Compassionate Redneck”, has coined a series of compelling campaign slogans such as “Why the hell not?” and “How hard could it be?” Tonight he has recruited to the cause Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the wrestler who overturned the political order by defeating Republican and Democrat candidates to become Governor of Minnesota in 1996.

They make a formidably peculiar double act: Mr Friedman in black cowboy boots and a fringed waistcoat that appears to have been sewn together from dead racoons; Mr Ventura built like a steer on steroids with a foot-long Fu Manchu beard plaited to a point and the million-mile stare of the truly mad.

“I have absolutely no political experience,” Mr Friedman declares proudly, to whoops of approval. “You gotta get off your asses and vote for Kinky,” Mr Ventura grunts with theatrical menace.

The Friedman campaign may be the funniest that America has seen, but beneath the humour there are profound political undercurrents. Voter apathy and disillusionment is rife in Texas, as elsewhere in the US, and a meagre 29 per cent of the electorate voted in the previous gubernatorial election.

Currently Mr Friedman, to the surprise of everyone, including himself, is running in second place, only nine percentage points behind Rick Perry, the Republican incumbent. But those polls record only “likely” voters. It is the unlikely ones, voting for a most unlikely candidate, that could swing the result, and if turnout increases by only 10 per cent then the next occupant of the governor’s mansion in Austin will be a man who rose to fame singing Get your Biscuits in the Oven and your Buns in the Bed with a band called the Texas Jewboys.

Mr Friedman has a few policies, but opinions by the handful, most of them deliberately offensive: he is in favour of gay marriage (“They have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us”), legalising gambling to pay for primary education (“slots for tots”) and smoking Cuban cigars (“I’m not trading with the enemy; I’m burning their fields”). He is less partial to fossil fuels ( “we are running out of dinosaur wine”), Castro (“a 45-year legacy of arresting librarians”) and Southern Baptists (“They don’t hold them down long enough”).

He caused deep offence earlier in his campaign by ascribing a rise in Houston crime to the “crackheads and thugs” among the refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Since the majority of those refugees are black, the remark was held to have racial overtones, although Mr Friedman insists that he was referring only to a minority criminal element.

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