TRANSCRIPT
- I mean, I was lucky.
Both sides of my family are funny.
That's why it was always fun for me to go to a family function, is I'm like the seventh funniest person.
There's no pressure on me at all.
But my dad was funny, my mom is funny, my brother's funny.
You know, these are just people that would never get on stage.
But my wife didn't come from a family like that, you know?
And so the first time she was around us, you know, she was like, oh my gosh, they're insane.
You know, because if my brother walked in and had a zit on his forehead, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is, you know, the biggest zit I've ever seen.
And my wife's like, you're gonna hurt his feelings.
I'm like, no, you gotta give him a hard time about it.
It's a big zit, you know?
So, I mean, I was a product of it growing up.
We always laugh, we still always laugh.
I mean, with my grandfather, it was Jerry Clower because that was closer to his world.
You know, he had grown up in the country.
He was a fireman, but I think he was a fireman because he worked one day and then had two in a row off, which he was fishing the whole time that he was off.
You know, they watched "Heehaw," you hear people do jokes about "Heehaw" now.
I mean, come Saturday night, "Heehaw" is on at my grandparents' house and I probably saw every episode of "Heehaw" and memorized the songs.
So, I mean, there was a lot of comedy that probably didn't connect with them.
And that's the key to standup, is you gotta connect with people.
You know, I had a buddy, a comic from Georgia that would go to New York City and get frustrated because he didn't go over as well, and I said, you can't talk about pimento cheese sandwiches in Manhattan, 'cause they don't know what you're talking about.
I remember early on, a comic from New York coming to the punchline in Atlanta and being backstage and griping about, "These audiences are stupid."
And I'm like, no, they're not.
You're doing subway jokes and we don't have subways.
So, if you don't have that connection, it's never gonna work.
I remember the first audition that I ever went on in LA, and they wanted a skinny, funny southern guy.
And I mean, and this is in my days of the mullet was working, and I thought, boy, I got a shot at this.
And I go in and I start reading and about three lines in, the casting director stops me and she says, can you do a real Southern accent?
And I said, what do you mean?
She goes like that, "Hi y'all.
Hi y'all."
And I said, well, that's not a real Southern accent.
That's a Hollywood Southern accent, you know?
But they had us pigeonholed.
I mean, you know, southerners have this reputation that I used to say, you know, when people hear the Southern accent, they automatically deduct a hundred IQ points.
Which, I mean, I understand, nobody wants to hear their brain surgeon say, "A'ight, now what we gonna do is saw the top of your head off, root around in there with a stick, and see if we can't find that dad burned clot."
You're like, "No, I'll just die."
But you know, there's a lot of smart people that talk like this.
You talk like where you grew up.
And the amazing thing that I have learned about comedy in this country, doing standup, I have been to all 50 states, which, you know, to me that's kind of cool.
Not many people have been to all 50.
And I've been to every part of all 50 states.
And I thought growing up in the South, well, people in the Northeast are different, people in the in the Midwest are different.
We're not, we have different accents and the scenery changes.
People are alike.
And that's why whatever it is that I do worked, because we're alike.
Because, you know, I'll have magazines that will say, well, I guess the redneck jokes only work in the South.
It's like, no, actually, they work in Alaska, and they work in Pennsylvania, and they work in Oregon.
- [Interviewer] It comes out in your show all the time, but are you a redneck?
And how do you define redneck?
- (laughs) I will speak to that.
(laughs) Well, my definition of a redneck, it is a glorious absence of sophistication.
And it started because, that's what I got called.
I would go to work in New York and I wore jeans and cowboy boots and talked like this.
And it was always good natured, but you'd be sitting around the bar at the end of the night, and they're like, Foxworthy, you just an old redneck from Georgia, you know, drove a truck.
They just kinda loved the whole thing.
And before I did standup, I had never been anywhere.
Well, I found traveling around the country, it was like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I am, but you've got 'em, too.
And then it kind of all came to a head one night.
I was working in a comedy club right outside Detroit, Michigan.
And we're sitting around at the end of the night, and they're kidding me about being a redneck.
And the club is attached to a bowling alley that has valet parking.
And I said, well, if you don't think you have rednecks, look out the window.
People are valet parking at the bowling alley.
And I went back to the room, and I was like, yeah, I know what I am, but obviously a lot of people don't.
And I wrote "Ten Ways to Tell," never thinking it was gonna be a hook, or a book, or a calendar.
It was just a bit.
But it connected with people.
And I found pretty soon, it wasn't the wild over the top ones that worked.
It was, if you're working television sits on top of your non-working television.
I mean, because people were like, oh my God, that's, you know, that was my grandparents.
That's somebody's aunt and uncle.
They were one-liners, and we live in an age where nobody does one-liners.
I don't do one-liners.
I think of myself as a storyteller.
But they were easy to remember, they were easy to retell, and they connected with people, and it was universal, you know, and it didn't, people that are...
I mean, Elvis.
Elvis had a billion dollars and he was putting carpet on the ceiling and shooting at the TVs.
Come on.
You know, it wasn't even an economic thing.
It was a state of mind.
But I think you had, it connected because it was across the entire country, and you had people that had kind of always had people laughing at 'em.
And now it was somebody laughing with 'em going, hey, that's what we are.
We know it, and we wouldn't be any other way.
And I think Hollywood always missed the boat on rednecks in that they had the idea that if you gave rednecks a billion dollars, they wouldn't be rednecks anymore.
That they would start wearing Armani suits.
And they wouldn't, they would buy a bigger truck and they would go to every NASCAR race, but they don't want to be something other than what they are, and so instead of being ashamed of it, it was like this was something that embraced it.
You know, the Beverly Hillbillies, I mean, it's a fish out of water story.
And that's why it was funny.
And I guess I relate it to my life.
Nothing in my life prepared me to be whatever small level of fame that I have.
Nothing prepared me to be famous.
Nothing prepared me to be rich.
I mean, we had a dirt yard growing up, you know, a telephone pole and plywood, and that was our basketball goal.
And of course, I never felt like we were lacking anything.
I mean, I had a great childhood.
When you're not prepared for these things in life, often you really don't know how to respond to them.
And so, you know, I think I said when I took my family to Hawaii, which I really did, it was like the "Clampetts go to Maui," because they are showing up with grocery bags, and they're showing up with coolers, 'cause they're going on a trip.
I mean, that's what you do when you go to Gatlinburg, why wouldn't that be what you do when you go to Maui?
But that's why the Beverly Hillbillies worked.
They were still cooking possum innards, you know, that's what they ate in Tennessee, that's what they're gonna eat in Beverly Hills.
Yeah, I think I definitely stand on the shoulders of people like Jerry Clower and Minnie Pearl.
I'll tell you an interesting thing about country music.
If you think about it, country music is the only form of music that's always had comedy associated with it.
Love, rock and roll, love the song "Layla," have no idea what it's about.
You know, jazz, you don't have jazz comics, but there's comedians in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and I think it's caused, we're both storytellers.
A good country song is a story, and you understand what it's about, and that's what comedians do.
There's a story that connects, and that's why it works.
I didn't grow up listening to country music, and I was more of a rock and roll guy growing up, and I remember opening for a rock and roll show, rock and roll and comedy do not mix.
And I did a show during college spring break on the beach, at Daytona Beach, and I was between the heavy metal band Poison and the Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Contest.
So, you know, the guy's like, "Hey, you wanna hear some more rock and roll?"
(Jeff imitating crowd cheering) "You wanna see some women in bikinis?"
(Jeff imitating crowd cheering) "Okay, but first a comedian."
I mean, they're throwing beer at me, I haven't even made it to the mic and they're throwing beer at me.
And I said then, I'm not doing this anymore.
A few weeks later, I'm working at a little club in Savannah, Georgia.
Emmylou Harris is in town, her opening act gets sick.
Guy calls the club, he says, is there anybody there that can be funny for 15 minutes and be clean?
And they were like, yeah, Foxworthy can do it.
And I go over, and do my 15 minutes, and they sat, and they listened, and they laughed.
And I was like, oh my gosh, this is my audience.
I think that I had an audience that had been ignored for a long time, because most of the media stuff in this country comes out of New York and LA, and I would always argue to them, there's 200 million people in between that aren't hip, and aren't on the cutting edge.
You know, they get up and go to work, and they get up and take their kids to school, and they get up and go to church.
It's kind of the backbone of the country.
And that's who I wanted to talk to.
That's who I connected with.
Not that I didn't ever go to work in New York or LA, but it was in the middle of the country.
And so I think that's probably why I sold more records.
And they were clean.
You didn't have to turn 'em off, you know, when your aunt and uncle walked into the room.
And so, I think it's because they had a real wide audience.
I do censor myself, and I think a lot of comics don't, there's sometimes I look at that and think, oh, I wish I could just say this, but I mean, if I think of something that I think, oh boy, that's too much of a bathroom humor joke, I call Larry the cable guy and I give it to him, and then I get to laugh at it later when I see it on TV.
(laughs) But, you know, there's some things, I never wanted to hurt anybody with what I was saying.
I always, I used to say in the beginning, I wanted to do a show that if my family walked in and I didn't know it, I wouldn't be embarrassed when I came off stage.
And, it's funny, the older I've gotten, probably the cleaner I've become, but there's this part of me that likes to walk right up to the line and see how far you can lean over it without stepping over it.
You know, somebody told me one time, Johnny Carson, the things that appealed to him, he said, you can walk me into the bathroom, but don't show me what's in the toilet.
And so, for a guy that worked clean, but had this little streak, it was always, how can you say something without saying something.
I remember Cosby doing a bit about his wife giving birth, and he said, at one point she stood up in the stirrups and informed everyone, my parents were never married.
Well, that's 10 times funnier than saying she called him a bastard, and it was the way that he worded it.
And so you can say things, and I've always said things without saying 'em.
I remember when our oldest daughter born, and I was putting together a set for "The Tonight Show" for Leno, and I saw Jay one night, and that was kind of when everybody was filming the delivery, and, you know, that was the big thing of the day.
And I said, "Jay, can I do a joke about that?"
"And he's like, ah, yeah, I don't know."
And so it became a challenge.
It's like, alright, can I say this without saying this?
And I said, you know, somebody said, "Oh, you should have filmed the delivery.
It's such a beautiful moment."
And I said, you know, I've seen those films.
To me it looks more like a wet Saint Bernard trying to come in through the cat door.
Well, there's nothing dirty there, but it's, everybody knows what you're saying.
So, that's the art of it.
But yeah, I've censored myself a lot.
but there's slots for all of it, you know?
There's a place for the guy that's really dirty, and there's a place for the guy that's... And I don't, you know, I remember early on Leno saying to me about working clean.
He was like, "Here's the thing, if you work clean," he goes, "you're always gonna work," he goes, "you got a show, 20 bucks ahead, you get mom, dad, grandpa, junior, grandma, that's a hundred bucks!"
You know?
So I mean, for Jay, it was a business thing.
But for me, it was like I wanted to do Carson.
And I had known guys that were dirty in the clubs and they tried to clean it up to go on TV and it never worked.
And so it was like, well, you might as well, if I can follow a guy in a club that's really dirty and I can be clean and I can still make him laugh, then I'll be able to do TV.
I had gotten to the point, and I was on the road, I was doing over 500 shows a year, eight years in a row, just, I mean, every night.
But I lived in Smyrna, Georgia.
I was traveling the country.
I was headlining every comedy club in the country, but I couldn't get on "The Tonight Show."
I would send them tapes.
They wouldn't open 'em.
And so my wife said, you know, "Unless we moved to LA you're never gonna know."
We moved to LA, two weeks later I'm performing at the Improv, and the talent coordinator walks out and goes, why haven't you done "The Tonight Show"?
And I'm like, you won't open my tape.
But Jay was guest hosting then, and Jay liked me.
And I, you know, five weeks after moving to LA, I'm on "The Tonight Show."
But then that was the top of the mountain for a comic.
You didn't have all these cable stations, you didn't have, you know, 500 possibilities of where people could see you.
That was it.
That was, in fact, I've got a picture in my office, and it's me sitting in the chair talking and Johnny's laughing.
Old black and white photo, and I was like, that's all I ever wanted to do.
I remember going home that night and laying in the bed going, I don't have a plan.
That was my plan, I made Johnny laugh.
I don't know what to do now.
And it was weird with Johnny.
With Jay, Jay kind of comes and hangs out with you in the dressing room, and you know, he's friendly with everybody.
But with Johnny, you never saw him before you walked on the show.
And it was kind of an unwritten thing.
If Johnny didn't like you, he would just clap.
If he liked you, he would give you, you know, the big OK sign.
And if he really liked you, he would call you over.
Well, as a comic, you've been on the road 500 shows a year for a decade for this six minute shot in front of Caesar, who's gonna decide if you live or die in this business, so you get to the end of the six minutes, you're scared to look.
You're scared to death, you know, and I remember looking over and he's saying, come.
And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna live, you know, what are we gonna talk about?
But Johnny had that gift.
Johnny made everybody look good.
Johnny was content to just lob 'em up and let you hit 'em and make you look good, because he knew if you look good, the show looked good and the world was right.
(bright music)
