To borrow a phrase from rising Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a redneck if you have bought a copy of Foxworthy’s album, “You Might Be a Redneck If . . .”
“There’s a good chance you are-and if you aren’t, you probably know one,” grants Foxworthy, a Georgia-born standup comic, author and unlikely recording star now residing comfortably in Los Angeles.
At last look, after more than a year of movement slowly but steadily up the country music charts, Foxworthy’s first effort at big-time record-making-which both slams and celebrates what seems to be the only American group left unprotected by the doctrine of political correctness-was still rising. It was, in fact, ensconced at No. 11 in Billboard magazine, hovering on the verge of official certification as “gold” (a seller of more than 500,000 copies).
Often seen opening concerts for country superstars, the mid-30ish funnyman now does one-nighters for fees at least “15 times” what he used to get doing one-week stands on the comedy-club circuit. His decade-long career has moved his place of residence from Atlanta to Hollywood to Beverly Hills, and he now is being offered such heady things as roles on network television sitcoms.
His unlikely success, Foxworthy says, is rooted in his refusal to change his accent when his act started taking him outside the South. He recalls that his rise began one night eight years ago in Detroit when he came off the stage, went back to his hotel room and began writing down ways the average person could tell if he or she belonged in that unenvied social stratum whose nape is of a pinker hue. You yourself might belong, he says, if:
– Your wife’s hairdo has ever been caught in a ceiling fan.
– Your porch collapses and kills three dogs.
– Your home is mobile and your car isn’t.
And so on, ad hilarium.
“Every time I’d go to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere,” he explains, “they’d kid me when I’d start talking, and it was always stuff like, `Oh, you’re from the South, where all the rednecks are.’
“And one week I was working at this comedy club in Detroit that was attached to a bowling alley that had valet parking. I said (to the audience), `Y’all look out the window! This is a baited field for rednecks! You couldn’t keep a redneck away from something like that if you tried!’
“So I went back to the hotel and thought, `Lord, there’s a lot of folks in this world that just don’t realize they’re rednecks.’ So I started making a list of ways to tell. I did it onstage the next night and it was one of those things that just worked from the first time.”
That night, a star was born. So has Foxworthy made himself the enemy of the species in question, a demographic subgroup not widely known for its appreciation of wit?
No. He has, in fact, become the hero of this class he has singled out for ribbing. At his autograph signings, he says, people bring along copies of his books with checkmarks beside each redneck trait and proudly announce, “We’ve done ever’ one of these.”
Why? It might have to do with the fact that Foxworthy himself admits to having firsthand, indeed familial, familiarity with redneckism. Thus his denigration is also a celebration, the pot calling the kettle black. He talks like a redneck, acts like a redneck and sort of says he is a redneck-which, of course, is the shrewdest stratagem of self-defense.
“I don’t think,” he reflects, deadpan, “that somebody from the Bronx could do this.”
Probably not. Coming from somebody from the Bronx, Foxworthy’s barbs almost surely would sound as if they were being delivered with contempt, the kind of attitude that can really rattle a redneck’s rifle rack. From Foxworthy, it takes on the aura of a family reunion whose participants are laughing together about their private idiosyncracies.
What exactly is a redneck, after all? Literally, it’s somebody rural who has deeply tanned the back of his or her neck doing outdoor work. But Foxworthy’s much-less-literal definition includes the millions of relatives and descendants of the classic variety, people who, beneath a thin, acquired veneer of urbanity, still carry the identifying gene.
“I call it a glorious lack of sophistication,” Foxworthy says. “Between New York and L.A., rednecks are pretty much the majority of us. Somebody said to me, `Isn’t that the lowest common denominator?’ I said, `I think it’s the most common denominator.’ “
Foxworthy should know. Born in an Atlanta environ called Hapeville, Ga., he’s a Georgia Tech graduate whose father worked at IBM and who himself had embarked on an IBM career before chucking it to “tell jokes.” He says his father held down a “coat-and-tie job” but had a different, secret life.
“He’d get off work and get in his truck and drive home listening to his country music,” Foxworthy says. “And he’d get a beer and sit out on the back porch and watch the bug zapper. My dad could be entertained by the bug zapper for the entire evening. But the people who worked with him would never have believed that.”
The son was the “funny guy” in high school and then at Georgia Tech. Then he was the “funny guy” at IBM, where he, too, got a coat-and-tie job for five years. One day some friends dared him to go onstage in an amateur contest at a comedy club.
He had never been in a comedy club at the time, he recalls, and onstage he was “so nervous I couldn’t even look at anybody.” He didn’t really tell jokes, he says; he just talked about his family. But he won the contest. Before long he informed his parents that he was quitting IBM to work the comedy circuit.
“They thought I had lost my mind-’til the first time I was on the `Tonight Show,’ ” he recalls. “Then my mother was like, `Well, you know you just wasted all those years at IBM.’ `Well, if I remember right, Mama, you was flopping like a bass on the kitchen floor.’ They like it now, but they seriously thought I had lost my mind.”
His technique is distinctive. Never, he says, has he just “told jokes.” Neither has he employed the kind of harpoon humor that gets laughs at the expense of a lot of people whose feelings might be hurt. It is hard to believe a man can be as funny as Foxworthy these days without cutting people down, but somehow he pulls it off.
His discourse on the Southern accent, and how it doesn’t wear well on brain surgeons and rocket scientists, is alone worth the price of admission, but because he uses it himself it doesn’t come off sounding superior. He says he has learned two great lessons that have helped his album get radio play, a rarity for comedy these days.
“When I was first starting out, Jay Leno was the king of the comedy clubs, but he was nice enough to sit and talk to anybody,” Foxworthy says. “He told me from the get-go, always work clean. It’s easier to be dirty and get the cheap laugh, but if you’re clean you can always work, and you can go on anywhere. They know they can put me on the radio and not offend people.”
He doesn’t offend people in person, either. He recalls that early in his career he did a routine about how fat one of his cousins was-until somebody came up to him after the show and gently suggested that it might make overweight people feel bad.
“I stopped doing it that night and never did it again,” he says. “I’m not-and never have been-in this business to hurt people’s feelings. Life’s too short. There are a lot of things to be upset about in this world, and this isn’t supposed to be one of them.”
He also resists any urge to crow about living in the lap of luxury. Onstage and in interviews, unless pressed, he says he lives in Los Angeles, not Beverly Hills. Pressed, he just produces another funny line.
“That’s just because everybody’s always bringing up the Clampetts, you know,” he explains in his best redneck drawl. “They live three blocks away from us. Why, we hardly ever see ’em.”
