It’s a long way from Peachtree Street in Atlanta, where this redneck comedian began his long ascent to the top, and even further from Los Angeles, where he now lives and where his future lies.
Jeff Foxworthy Interview
The slate-gray Michigan landscape envelops us as we drive from Dearborn to Saginaw, site of Jeff Foxworthy’s performance tonight. Foxworthy is starring in his own Saturday night sitcom, “The Jeff Foxworthy Show,” which airs this season on ABC. It could make him an even bigger star, in the mold of his fellow Atlantan Brett Butler, who, also went from comic nothingness to a highly successful stand-up career to her own smash TV show.
But Peachtree Street and Beverly Hills are the past and future. It’s the present Foxworthy wants to savor. In a mere decade, the comedian who’s destined to teach everyone in the country how to know if you’re a redneck has climbed from amateur stand-up nights where he was so nervous he couldn’t look at the audience to life as a multimedia star.
His vehicle is a never-ending succession of jokes like “You might be a redneck if… your family tree doesn’t fork,” or “if… your wife’s hairdo has ever been ruined by a ceiling fan,” or “if… you think Volvo is part of a woman’s anatomy,” or, finally, “if… you ever had to climb the town water tower with paint remover and a paintbrush to salvage your sister’s reputation.”
His CD “You Might Be a Redneck If…,” sure ’nuff, spent weeks near the top of the country-music chart earlier this year, though the only thing country about it was Foxworthy’s bourbon-and-molasses Southern accent. His half-dozen mini-books featuring some of the one-liners that have made his stage act legendary have sold well over a million copies. His calendars and T-shirts have been almost as successful. And, in contrast to the days when he performed in the smoky, packed Punch Line in Atlanta before dozens, his road show of stand-up humor now takes him to venues seating thousands across the country.
Foxworthy no longer knows from pre-concert jitters, and over some Marlboro Lights — what else for two Atlanta boys? — and copious Cokes, writer Michael Pousner talked with comedy’s country boy about the many faces of Jeff.
How does it feel to be hot?
I’m smart enough to understand that nobody stays hot forever, but this is my time. It won’t last, maybe, but it’s nice that I’m here, even though I’m on the road most weekends.
“Saturday Night Live” parodied you twice on the Weekend Update segment. First there was that routine, “You know you’re a tornado if…” Then they did, “You know you’re an airborne virus if…” (a take-off on the movie Outbreak). How does that feel?
You know, I had a friend in Atlanta who said, “They’re making fun of you.” But I didn’t take it that way at all. My wife thinks it’s the ultimate compliment to be parodied. They’re doing you as you.
How do you feel about a Jeff Foxworthy CD jumping into the top five of the country charts?
You can plot out things only so much, but somewhere along the line things have to happen. The disadvantage of doing a comedy album is, you don’t get airplay like a song. It was a word-of-mouth thing.
How does your family feel about your constantly making fun of them in your routines?
Well, it gets to my wife when we’re in an airport and someone comes up to her and asks, “Are you the one with the cold butt?”
“It gets to my wife when someone comes up in an airport and asks, ‘Are you the one with the cold butt?’”
Will you explain that?
Well, I do a routine talking about things I’ll never understand about women. And one of them is, “Why is it that when women get in bed with you their butt and feet are always freezing?” Hell, it can be 98 degrees outside and it’s below freezing in your bed. That butt is ice cold, and they want to put it on you. It’s like snuggling with a Butterball turkey. I can lick my hand and put it on my wife’s butt and it’ll stick.
Well, after the people who remind her of that routine leave, we’ll walk away, and she’ll whisper, “As soon as the money stops, you’re through talking about my rear end I”
I try to spread it out among my family, so they all take the grief now. My Aunt Rose is about the only one with a little dignity. She’s a doctor and looks elegant, but I got her about the trip to Hawaii I got for my family with all my Delta frequent-flyer miles. I say, “We stayed on the beach, and you could tell which rooms we were in — the ones with the underwear hanging off the rail. And, according to the manager of the hotel, our rooms were the site of the only peeing-for-distance competition they ever had, which, I am ashamed to admit, my Aunt Rose won!”
The first time I did that was at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, and she was in the second row, and you could see all her blood leave her face. And now that poor woman who has 70 degrees or so from Emory Medical School and elsewhere is known as the “peeing-for-distance contest winner.”
Of course, you’re known for your “You might be a redneck if…” jokes. What was their origin?
I didn’t do it in the beginning. I had been doing stand-up a couple of years, and I was venturing out of the South. I was playing a comedy club in Michigan, and up North they were always ragging me about my accent. Well, I was having a drink with some people at the club bar after the show, and they were saying all the rednecks are in the South. Then I noticed that the comedy club was attached to a bowling alley where they had valet parking — if you can believe it — and I said, “This is a regular gathering ground for rednecks!”
I went back to the hotel that night and wrote ten ways for people to tell if you’re a redneck, and it became one of those bits that first night out of the chute [clicking his fingers] … it scored.
Do some of the bad ol’ boys from down South ever get offended at Mr. Foxworthy?
Funny thing is that no one has ever been offended by it. I think it’s because it never comes from a mean place. It’s laughing “with” instead of “at.” Now, I don’t think you could be a comic from the Bronx and say, “You might be a redneck if… ” It’s like people can’t make fun of my brother, but I can. Now it’s to the point that people fax redneck jokes to me. It’s one of those magic things that hit a comic nerve. A guy said to me recently that I had taken the bad edge off of “redneck” — turned it from an insult into a compliment.
What’s funny is that this has occurred in such a politically correct age.
Everybody is so sensitive about everything today that the success of the redneck thing surprises other people more than me. I can’t go onstage and do jokes about gays or blacks. You even have to be careful what you say about women. The beautiful thing about rednecks is that if you don’t want to be included in the group, you can deny you are one. At book signings, people inevitably come up to me and say, “I’m not a redneck, but my brother is,” or something like that. I just hand them an autographed book and say, “Start reading.” They get five pages into it and shriek, “Oh my God, I’ve done this’”
My theory is that most of us are guilty [of being rednecks]. My dad was an executive at IBM, but hell, at night he’d come outside and pop a beer and watch the bug zapper at work. My father watched a bug zapper for years at a time!
I’m not so sure being a redneck is a bad thing. I know I wouldn’t want to be anything else. Hell, look at Elvis. That guy had more money than anyone else, but if you go to Memphis and stand in the Jungle Room at Graceland, you’d exclaim, “Elvis was a redneck!”
How so?
You owe it to yourself to see the Jungle Room. There’s leopard upholstery on a sofa carved out of wood, and real deep pile shag carpet in an outrageous color. It’s beautiful. You know there’s some nail clippings somewhere in that carpet.
Who else is a redneck? Bill Clinton?
He’s definitely a redneck. It’s all Clinton can do to keep the appliances off of the White House lawn. I think he spent his whole life trying to get away from being categorized as a redneck.
How about Newt Gingrich?
Newt definitely has that redneck quality of not thinking before saying something. He’ll let something go before he’s thought about it, and then he has to apologize.
Are you afraid of being stereotyped?
No, and maybe I should be, because I get asked that a lot. You know, I have a lot of friends that are funny people. They’re out there on the road doing shows constantly, and they’re not making money. You’ll laugh for an hour when seeing them, but people don’t remember them. If I get stereotyped, it’s because redneck was the thing that broke me [out], got me into the big clubs. My wife always said that they come to see the redneck thing, but there’s other stuff in the two hours of a routine that makes them come back and see me.
“Elvis had more money than anyone else, but if you go to the Jungle Room at Graceland, you’d exclaim, ‘Elvis was a redneck!’”
Who’ve been the big influences for Jeff Foxworthy?
A lot of people. Bill Cosby was certainly one. As a kid, I’d save my allowance and buy Cosby records and memorize them in a day — something about go-carts for instance — and I’d go to school and do them. My parents used to get me out of bed in my pajamas for their friends. “Do the go-cart thing,” they’d order me. So I would do it, and everyone would laugh, and then my parents would tell me to go back to bed. And hell, my adrenaline would be flowing even at that young age, and I’d say, “Let me do more Cosby for you.”
Another thing I liked about Cosby is that he always did it clean. Just like Jay Leno, who is a big influence on me to this day. Leno told me early on, “If you work clean, you’ll always get work.” Another thing about Leno — he worked constantly. He always said you make fans two at a time, and I’ve always believed that.
You’ve talked about how poor you were early on, that you had to take some atrocious gigs. What was the worst?
Well, I was working in Daytona Beach during spring break one year early on, and I had the misfortune of being the middle act between Poison — that super-hot group that the kids liked then — and the Hawaiian Tropic Spring Bikini Contest. Well, the kids wanted me off the stage right away, and spent the whole time hitting me with plastic cups full of beer and throwing hot dogs at me. After that, I said no more of such gigs.
Where is the sleaziest place you ever worked?
Well, I never did tittie bars, but I’ve played some pretty shitty honky-tonks. One time I played Montgomery, or some place, in Alabama, and I knew I was in for a rough time when the club rules on the front door said, “No loaded weapons in the showroom.” Hell, that meant you could have guns — they just couldn’t be loaded! They had strippers on the sly and all kinds of pool tables, and as soon as I read about the loaded guns, I took my tie off and put it in my pocket.
I went onstage, and the audience was full of shiny gold teeth. I didn’t know what the hell I would do to win [over] this audience. So the first thing out of my mouth was something like, ‘Hey, don’t you hate all those assholes in New York City?” And they went, “Whew! Whew!” [whistling approval] and I knocked them dead for the rest of the routine.
So I walked off the stage, and one of those big ol’ boys came up to me and said, “Hey, boy, you’re funny as shit” — which I’m still not sure was a compliment — and the manager comes up to me right in front of all these old boys and pays me $300 in cash.
So one of them says instantly, “We’d like you to shoot pool with us. We like to play for money.” Well, I sized up the situation quickly and realized I’d be dead in half an hour, and I said, “You go in there and rack ’em and I’m going to take a piss down the hall, and then I’ll take every penny you’ve got.” And they went, “Whew! Whew!” and ran away to rack ’em. and I flew past the bathroom and out the front door, and drove away in an instant. Hell, I needed that $300.
Somehow, after all this, Jeff Foxworthy seems like an unlikely alumnus of engineering-obsessed Georgia Tech. Why did you go there, and how did you do?
I didn’t know at that point in my life what I wanted to do, and I wanted to stay close to home. I played every sport in high school and was real popular, and then I went to Tech and got lost in the shuffle of all the academic people. I worked my way through school and didn’t have much fun. I had to laugh a few years ago when Tech wanted to name me a “distinguished alumnus.” The whole time I was there, I was either on warning or probation, and now I’m a distinguished alumnus. It’s wild.
Your years-long tenure at IBM seems even more unlikely, even if your dad was an exec there.
Well, I finally quit Tech and decided to work on a farm, and you find out six months down the road, there’s not a lot of money in working on a farm. So I finally broke down and called Dad and asked, “Can you get me an interview at IBM?” I had hair down to here and a real cool beard, and Dad looked at me in disgust and said, “It’ll help your chances if you don’t look like Jesus.”
Some of your time as a systems engineer at IBM is legendary around Atlanta.
I started out in computer dispatch, where people would call in about broken computers. We would assign guys who fixed them. Well, I never got far away from comedy. We would mess with those guys who went out to fix. We’d disguise our voices and send them out anyplace but the place they were supposed to go.
We’d get bored, and that’s when we did the “dust in the phone lines” routine. We’d call a new receptionist and say, “This is Bill Jackson from the phone company. We’ve tracked the static on your lines to dust in the system. Please put your phone console over your trash can and shake it.” She’d do it, and we’d be laughing like hyenas.
Another time I’d call, again as Jackson from the phone company, and say, “I’ve got to do some security work on your lines. Whatever you do, don’t pick up the phone if it rings in the next ten minutes. Otherwise, I might get electrocuted.” So she would agree and I’d call her right back. After ten minutes of letting the phone ring, she’d finally get exasperated and answer it. All she’d hear on the line was “Ahhh”
I guess it’s safe to say the brain trust at IBM never envisioned me as becoming a great leader in the corporate world.
“Clinton’s definitely a redneck. And Newt has that redneck quality of not thinking before saying something… and then he has to apologize.”
When did you finally quit and go into comedy full-time?
I was making everyone in my office in IBM laugh, and one guy asked, “Have you ever thought about going onstage?” I answered that I had never even been in a comedy club, and he offered to take me to watch. The second week, I said, “Hell, I’ll try it.” And it was a contest, the Great Southeastern Laugh-Off. I wrote five minutes about my family and was prepared to perform on amateur night. But the club wasn’t planning on using me. So I got about 30 people to call constantly and ask, “When is Foxworthy performing?” Finally, the Punch Line decided Foxworthy must be someone big, they decided to use me, and — just like that — I won. I couldn’t even look at the audience, I was so scared. That was the beginning of my club career, and the beginning of something else, too, because my future wife, Pamela Greg, was in the audience, and later a mutual friend introduced us.
I quit IBM soon after that. Incidentally, I call my wife Greg, so if you hear me refer to sleeping with Greg, don’t think I’ve been in L.A. too long.
Tell us about the early Jeff Foxworthy career.
[I was] broke, but every time I’d get discouraged something good would happen. I remember one night I was the third act, and Steven Wright was the headliner when he was really hot. He came up to me and said something like, “Hang in there, you have talent,” and that made a big impression on me. that he would come over and say that.
Things would get pretty bad at times. After about three months, I drove 12 hours to Sarasota, Florida, completely broke. As I got to the club, there was a sign saying they had closed that day. I didn’t even have enough money to spend the night, or for gas for my car. So I drove the 12 hours home, and ran out of gas just before I got there.
But I never thought of giving it up and going back to IBM. Thank God my wife took jobs like working for Kelly Girl. As a matter of fact, I worked temporarily for Kelly Girl, too, at this time, in a warehouse dispatcher’s office. But I set goals for myself, when I would be a second act, when I would be a headliner, and I was able to meet them.
You’re well known as a workaholic.
I just came out of the chute right, and I’ve never been scared of hard work. I’d be on the road 48 weeks a year, Tuesday through Saturday — Greg would join me about half the time — and I’d come home on Sunday and wash my clothes, and I’d be off again.
What brought you to L.A.?
Well, we started having babies. And at the time I was headlining all over the country, but I couldn’t get anybody to look at me, like “Evening at the lmprov” or HBO or Carson, and my wife believed it was because I was in Atlanta, off the beaten track. I remember one day we were getting ready to close on a house in Atlanta, and my wife called me on the road and said, “We’ve got to move to L.A., for your career.” I guarantee you I went kicking and screaming.
But leaving Peachtree Street behind made all the difference in the world. Didn’t it?
Things popped pretty fast. I was on “The Tonight Show” the week we moved there, and that Saturday night I won an American Comedy Award. Soon I was named Comedian of the Year, and Showtime gave me my own special.
You’re one of the cleanest male comedians around. Will you keep it up? Yes, but I’ve had my problems. For example, the week after my daughter was born, I asked Leno if I could do a thing on “The Tonight Show” about what the delivery films looked like when my baby was born. Jay grimaced and said, “Nah-too graphic.” Then it became a challenge to me to make a clean joke so that everyone knew exactly what I was talking about.
So I did a joke that went like this: “Somebody said you should film the moment of birth because it’s so beautiful, and I said, ‘No way. It looks like a wet St. Bernard trying to wiggle through the cat door.” Jay liked the joke, and it really worked on the show. There was nothing dirty about it, but it paints a picture, so everybody knows what you’re talking about. That’s the essence of a good, clean joke.
Where do your jokes come from?
From my experience. When I first started doing the redneck stuff, people said you should also do family jokes, but I didn’t have a family at the time, so I couldn’t relate to that. Then I had a family, and I could. Most jokes come out of stream-of-consciousness thinking. Comics have the same thoughts as everybody else, but we just learn how to think things out and write them down.
A routine can start with just a couple of words. For instance, the other day somebody said something about the term unconditional love. And I wrote it down and put it in my jacket, and then started thinking about it later. What does “unconditional love” mean? I bet there’s a whole routine there. I guarantee you there’s no woman in the world who loves a man unconditionally. I guarantee you there’s something you can do to screw up unconditional love. It may take three red-headed waitresses and a gallon of Cool Whip, but there’s got to be something you can do to make her not love you! I’m going to have some fun with that one.
How much do you miss the South?
A great deal. I miss the attitude when you pass people on the street and they say. “Hi, how are you doing?” Also, I miss the fact that southerners can always laugh at themselves. After the earthquake last year, it was all I could do to keep from moving back. It was the scariest 50 seconds of my life. It knocked our chimney off, damaged the foundation, and blew up the hot-water heater. When it stopped, I threw up — me, who can be backstage at “The Tonight Show” with all the pressure of the world on me when they say the show’s running short tonight. “Can you add three jokes?” And I answer yes, and do it without thinking. But I vomited after the earthquake.
Incidentally, I slept in the nude before the quake, but I haven’t since. I had an image of CNN filming me as they pull my nude body from the wreckage, and my mother seeing it.
Are there Jeff Foxworthy comedian groupies?
Not at all. And the ironic thing is that every time a magazine surveys women, they say the thing they look for most in a man is a good sense of humor. I went to a Robert Plant concert and he invited me backstage, and there’s where the groupies were. Someone was just picking beautiful girls out of packs of them to go backstage. “You come backstage. You too!” The usual criteria was whether they were wearing a bra or not!
What are your plans for the future?
More of the same. I’m also working on a movie about rednecks. It’s about a bunch of them who become billionaires in odd ways — like winning the lottery, operating a roadside fireworks stand, or perfecting a great deer lure. It never dawns on them that they can leave their trailer park. So they just build triple wides [mobile homes] and put in new basements. It’s called The Socialites.
What’s the best joke you’ve ever heard?
I’ve heard some great ones — usually in real life, because art really does imitate life. I was walking through the Detroit airport once, and over the loud-speaker someone announces, “Will the passenger who lost a hearing aid report to the Northwest counter?” I stopped and wondered just how many times they repeated that announcement! You know, “I repeat, Will the passenger… ?”
For those of us who remain fans, it does not seem like Jeff Foxworthy has missed much of a beat since this interview 30 years ago (as of this publication). We will admit to missing the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, mostly because of the juxtaposition of four very different, yet firmly rooted in a mainstream America audience, comedians. Naturally he still has an active website, and you can fill up an entire weekend of laughs if you find him on Spotify. … For those of you unfamiliar and not all that interested in listening, just remember these time-honored words of wisdom, “If you ever got too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck.”
