Comedy's in sad shape and I have proof
Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2005 10:01 pm
Copyed from Slate.com
The comedian known as Larry the Cable Guy (Dan Whitney) is the newest, and quite possibly the horniest, in a noble line of redneck philosophers. Following in the tradition of Hee Haw's Junior Samples, the humorist Lewis Grizzard, and his own colleague Jeff Foxworthy, Larry gives a voice to his own dyspeptic corner of the South. It is possible that this particular corner of Dixie exists only in Larry's imagination. It consists of strip clubs, flea markets, rodeos, Bass Pro Shops, the Waffle House, NASCAR events, and Long John Silver's. Dressing for all of them, Larry mounts the stage in a sleeveless flannel shirt, jeans, and a ball cap adorned with a fishhook. "I used to be a lifeguard," he says, "until some blue kid got me fired." A dim bulb whose chief interests are sex and food, Larry is an anachronism in the New South. He and his comrades from the film Blue Collar Comedy Tour have revived the ancient art of rednecking, one of comedy's most venerable forms.
It's tempting to view the success of the Blue Collar troubadours—the others are Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and Ron White—as a triumph of savvy packaging. But the comedy speaks to a broadly American condition: the feeling of being left out. Blue Collar was mounted as a rejoinder to The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), a film directed by Spike Lee that featured four black comedians. As Foxworthy explained to the New York Times, "[T]hat show left out the people who were not hip. They're the ones who wake up every morning and go to work and go to war, and, dadgum, there's a whole lot of 'em out there." A flop in theaters, Blue Collar became a hit on Comedy Central and has spawned a TV variety show. Of the foursome, Foxworthy, Engvall, and White are witty, urbane observers of southern life; Larry is their redneck id. In March, his CD The Right to Bare Arms debuted at No. 1 on the country charts—a first for a comedy album—and remained in the top spot for four weeks. Pollstar magazine placed him as America's highest-grossing road comedian through July, with more than $15 million in ticket sales.
Redneck comedy—the creation of a cretinous, backwoods alter ego—was once useful in maintaining the delicate social fabric of the South. According to James C. Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia, the redneck comedian provided a rallying point for bourgeois and lower-class whites alike. With his front-porch humor and politically outrageous bons mots, the redneck comedian created an illusion of white equality across classes. Thus united, Cobb explains, Southern whites could better band together against common "foes"—newly enfranchised blacks, Northern carpetbaggers, and so forth. Later, in the stew of bus boycotts and school integration, the redneck comedian attained a peculiar grandeur. Upon hearing about Brown v. Board of Education, Brother Dave Gardner, a white comedian, is said to have remarked: "Let 'em go to school; we went and we didn't learn nothing."
The comedian known as Larry the Cable Guy (Dan Whitney) is the newest, and quite possibly the horniest, in a noble line of redneck philosophers. Following in the tradition of Hee Haw's Junior Samples, the humorist Lewis Grizzard, and his own colleague Jeff Foxworthy, Larry gives a voice to his own dyspeptic corner of the South. It is possible that this particular corner of Dixie exists only in Larry's imagination. It consists of strip clubs, flea markets, rodeos, Bass Pro Shops, the Waffle House, NASCAR events, and Long John Silver's. Dressing for all of them, Larry mounts the stage in a sleeveless flannel shirt, jeans, and a ball cap adorned with a fishhook. "I used to be a lifeguard," he says, "until some blue kid got me fired." A dim bulb whose chief interests are sex and food, Larry is an anachronism in the New South. He and his comrades from the film Blue Collar Comedy Tour have revived the ancient art of rednecking, one of comedy's most venerable forms.
It's tempting to view the success of the Blue Collar troubadours—the others are Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and Ron White—as a triumph of savvy packaging. But the comedy speaks to a broadly American condition: the feeling of being left out. Blue Collar was mounted as a rejoinder to The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), a film directed by Spike Lee that featured four black comedians. As Foxworthy explained to the New York Times, "[T]hat show left out the people who were not hip. They're the ones who wake up every morning and go to work and go to war, and, dadgum, there's a whole lot of 'em out there." A flop in theaters, Blue Collar became a hit on Comedy Central and has spawned a TV variety show. Of the foursome, Foxworthy, Engvall, and White are witty, urbane observers of southern life; Larry is their redneck id. In March, his CD The Right to Bare Arms debuted at No. 1 on the country charts—a first for a comedy album—and remained in the top spot for four weeks. Pollstar magazine placed him as America's highest-grossing road comedian through July, with more than $15 million in ticket sales.
Redneck comedy—the creation of a cretinous, backwoods alter ego—was once useful in maintaining the delicate social fabric of the South. According to James C. Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia, the redneck comedian provided a rallying point for bourgeois and lower-class whites alike. With his front-porch humor and politically outrageous bons mots, the redneck comedian created an illusion of white equality across classes. Thus united, Cobb explains, Southern whites could better band together against common "foes"—newly enfranchised blacks, Northern carpetbaggers, and so forth. Later, in the stew of bus boycotts and school integration, the redneck comedian attained a peculiar grandeur. Upon hearing about Brown v. Board of Education, Brother Dave Gardner, a white comedian, is said to have remarked: "Let 'em go to school; we went and we didn't learn nothing."
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Never said I was bright
