Country Comedy Is an Evolving Tradition

By JOHN GEROME
The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- There's a recurring plot on "The Andy Griffith Show" in which outsiders from the big city _ sometimes the state police aiming to set the locals straight, sometimes crooks stalking an easy mark _ pay a visit to tiny Mayberry.

With a single bullet tucked in his shirt pocket, Deputy Barney Fife invariably finds a way to bumble things and confirms the outsiders' bias about small-town yokels.

But by the end of the episode, Sheriff Andy Taylor has outfoxed everyone, and good old-fashioned country wisdom has once again trumped big-city sophistication.

It's a classic story line of country comedy, one of the most recognizable exports of the South, a region that arguably is lampooned _ and lampoons itself like no other. From Minnie Pearl's "How-Dee!" to Gomer Pyle's "Gaaawlee!" to Larry the Cable Guy's "Git 'r' Done," the simple humor of the backwoods is an art form that has endured through changing times and even transcended its Southern roots.

"We understand that other people laugh at us," said comedian Jeff Foxworthy, "but I think it's also understood amongst us that even though we talk like this we're not nearly as stupid as other people think we are."

Foxworthy, host of "Blue Collar TV," is best known for his "You might be a redneck ..." routine, which chides and celebrates redneckism all at once. "If you've ever taken a beer to a job interview, you might be a redneck." Or, "If you use a fishing license as a form of ID ..."

The tradition that Foxworthy calls a "glorious absence of sophistication" goes back to vaudeville and the traveling minstrel and medicine shows of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Blending music with cornpone wisecracks, early country comedians found a wide audience on radio shows such as the National Barn Dance in Chicago and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones, Archie Campbell and, most notably, Minnie Pearl, were Opry regulars.

Minnie Pearl, a college-educated actress from Centerville, Tenn., whose real name was Sarah Cannon, wore knee-length country dresses and a straw hat with the dangling $1.98 price tag. Teaming with veteran comic Rod Brasfield, she greeted post- World War II audiences with a big "How-DEE!" and wide-eyed banter about her mythical hometown of Grinder's Switch.

"They were the cream of the crop," said Opry museum curator Brenda Colladay. "They did what Minnie referred to as double comedy. There was no straight man. They'd work off of each other. She'd come walking in and he'd say, 'Well, if it ain't Marilyn Monroe _ and it ain't.'"

But beneath the stereotypical surface, early country comedy may have played a role in maintaining the delicate social fabric of the South. University of Georgia history professor James C. Cobb said the redneck comedian created the illusion of white equality across classes.

"It was designed to keep whites unified, to prevent a rift in white society because a rift is going to weaken them in the face of an onslaught by Northerners or an effort by blacks to gain equality," Cobb said.

In the 1960s, with the Federal Communications Commission scrutinizing TV for increasingly violent content, programmers turned to country comedies, including "The Andy Griffith Show," whose fictional Mayberry was modeled after Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy, N.C., "Petticoat Junction," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C," "Green Acres" and the long-running variety program "Hee Haw."

The humor was often self-deprecating but, like Sheriff Andy Taylor, the rural characters often duped the city slicker, who usually sounded as though he'd wandered down from Cleveland.

"Our kind of comedy was, in an indirect way, a putdown, but we were putting down ourselves and laughing at ourselves," said Sam Lovullo, producer of "Hee Haw."

Critics derided "Hee Haw" as a hillbilly knockoff of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," but it aired almost continuously from 1969 to 1997. The comic skits were interspersed with performances by country music stars such as Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks and Willie Nelson. The most memorable prop was a cornfield where guests and regulars popped up from the stalks and told jokes like this one:

Grandpa Jones to Junior Samples: "I saw you riding on a mule and your wife was walking behind you. Why was that?"

Samples: "My wife ain't GOT no mule."

Lovullo said the jokes worked because they were natural, often derived from personal experience or from funny stories the performers heard growing up.

George Lindsey, an actor from Jasper, Ala., who played Goober on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Hee Haw," said Southerners have historically relied on a sense of humor to help them deal with the region's poverty.

"You have to have something to laugh at when you don't have anything," Lindsey said.

While most country comedians were Southerners, their humor wasn't always specific to the South. "Country" eventually became synonymous with "working class."

Foxworthy's "Blue Collar TV" on the WB network is an example. With characters like "Larry the Cable Guy" and skits about family life, marriage and bad jobs, the show celebrates the everyman _ whether he lives in Alabama or Nebraska. In fact, "Larry the Cable Guy," whose real name is Dan Whitney, was born and raised on a pig farm in Pawnee City, Neb., before coming to Georgia and Florida to create the character.

Foxworthy says the humor is universal, no matter the accent of the comic.

"If Jerry Seinfeld comes to a punch line in Atlanta, people are going to laugh because Jerry is funny. And if 'Larry the Cable Guy' is performing in Detroit, people are going to laugh because it's funny."

If Foxworthy sounds a bit touchy, it's because he is. He grew up in Georgia and says that while he's proud of his heritage, he thinks the Southern comic label is inaccurate and confining.

"Garrison Keillor is never labeled an Upper Midwest comic. Seinfeld is never labeled a Northern comic," he said. "In everything I've ever done, I've prefaced it that people think it's about the South, but it applies everywhere in the country. The redneck thing, for the most part, applies everywhere."

Indeed, Foxworthy's "Blue Collar TV" redneck seems a milder species than Minnie Pearl's, more at home in modern suburban sprawl than in the bygone barnyards and hay bales of "Green Acres" or "Hee Haw."

"It wouldn't work today," "Hee Haw" producer Lovullo said wistfully of his old show. "Somewhere along the line we've lost what 'Hee Haw' was about."