With apologies to Stanley Kubrick, the story of the public’s hunger for all things “blue collar” by way of the Southland could be called, “Larry the Cable Guy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Redneck Culture.”
OK, that might be stretching it.
But the proliferation of things loud, proud and spoken with an unmistakable twang continues to gain NASCAR-style momentum.
This summer provided more evidence that not only are these images splashing into the mainstream, but that a broad spectrum of folks are consuming depictions of working-class culture with gusto. And not just any working-class culture but the Colonel’s special-recipe version.
For the second straight week, the NASCAR-fueled comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” stayed atop the box-office pole. On opening weekend, Will Ferrell’s branded, logoed vehicle vroomed to the top of the chart with $46 million.
In June, comic Ron White contributed his own tome to the Redneck Lit shelf with “I Had the Right to Remain Silent … But I Didn’t Have the Ability.” It sits beside the recent works of his blue-collar-touring brethren Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy: “Jeff Foxworthy’s Redneck Dictionary: Words You Thought You Knew the Meaning Of” and “Git-R-Done.”
Granted, the Blue Collar Comedy Tour has been the rage for a while. Its last hurrah, “One for the Road,” came out on DVD in late June. The second season of the WB variety show “Blue Collar TV” hit video shelves in early August. It’s not a cottage industry. It’s an agribusiness.
But what to think when the most inventive company in Hollywood celebrates NASCAR culture, as Pixar did with “Cars”? The movie’s press junket was held at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C.
Asking if this glorification of what some consider low culture – and one that has been tied closely to bigotry – is a good or bad thing steers the car off the track. It’s here. And like the emergence of hip-hop and its variations, the growth of Southern-style,
blue-collar images promises highs and lows, revelations and stereotypes. It invites the inventive and the venal to the hoedown.
The richer question popular entertainment always poses is: Why do images and sounds – because music plays a big role here – excite us and/or make us so darn anxious and angry?
In the case of something that proclaims itself redneck, the anxieties are fairly obvious.
When Peter Applebome wrote about the Southernization of America, he called his book “Dixie Rising.” What a way to put a chill in the night air. At least for some of us. And isn’t that the unspoken fret?
Unspoken, that is, unless you’re Spike Lee. Asked by Playboy magazine if he would ever go to a NASCAR race, the gifted provocateur replied, “Yee-haw! I just imagine hearing some country-and-Western song over a loudspeaker at NASCAR” that calls for lynchings. “I’m not going to no NASCAR.”
Talk about your regional profiling. (Of course, hard-core members of this very demographic often argue that profiling has its roots, however twisted, in experience.)
NASCAR shouldn’t be taken as the end-all and be-all of Southern-style expansionism. Especially because that business entity has thrown itself into overdrive to expand its demographic.
Still, if you think Lee’s comment is just outsider trash-talking, check out Larry the Cable Guy’s riff on his platinum-selling CD, “The Right to Bare Arms.”
At a hospital, a kid asks Larry if he’s a NASCAR fan. When the comic replies with his trademark affirmation, “git-r-done,” the kid says, “NASCAR ain’t nothing but a bunch of mullet-headed rednecks drinking Busch beer, watching cars going around in circles all day.
First Larry gets angry. Then he calls the kid names. Then he corrects him: “NASCAR’s a lot more than that. We also got Budweiser.”
An ordinary icon
Larry the Cable Guy thinks of himself as a comedy fundamentalist.
“I don’t do a joke and think, this is going to tear down walls. I don’t really take my humor that way,” said Larry.
On the phone from his home in Nebraska, the comic is in no hurry to entertain sociological theories about his oft-scatological, down-home humor.
“I know for us blue collar guys, we don’t look too much into it. It’s just funny stuff,” said Larry. “People like to laugh; people don’t like to have a political agenda shoved down their throats all the time. And we didn’t really do that; we went on stage and said things we thought were funny and people enjoyed that.
“That has nothing to do with Red State or Blue State. I do just as well in the Northeast as I do as I do in the South and the Midwest.”
It was mainstreaming genius when Pixar cast him as the voice of Mater, the “Cars” character. After all, Larry the Cable Guy is the coarsest of the blue-collar quartet.
To play on Larry’s own phrase, I don’t care who you are – that’s ironic.
Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby won’t ever challenge the indelibility of such down-home characters as Barney Fife and Aunt Bea, Minnie Pearl and the “Hee Haw” bunch or the Clampetts. But Larry’s broken-down tow-truck with a serious twang stole the show.
“I’m having more fun than a twister in a trailer park,” was a line the snaggle-toothed truck popped off when he took a helicopter ride. It was off-color for the kiddies, perhaps, but it was sweet stupidity. It was also a good example of the humor Larry, Foxworthy, White and Bill Engvall have been honing on their Blue Collar Comedy Tour.
With his flannel shirt, hunting cap and fondness for bodily function funning, Larry plays the uncouth hayseed of the Blue Collar Tour four.
He’s got bite. He’s got more biases than the other three put together.
While his first feature flick, “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector,” did respectably in theaters when it opened in March, prior evidence suggest the just- released DVD version will, ahem, git-r-done.
“I’m always the brunt of the jokes,” he admitted. (Not always; he saves a special place for Rosie O’Donnell.)
He also gets the emotional ways that blue-collar and Southerness overlap. One misconception people have, Larry said, is that the “blue-collar” celebrated in the tour is strictly Southern comfort food.
“Y’know, it’s not just resonating in one part of the country. It’s everywhere. The kids I grew up with in southeast Nebraska are the same kids I grew up with in Florida, are the same kids I see in Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, who live in the rural areas. They’re all the same. They just have different accents.”
While he’s been accused of laying his own on a little thick, Larry, born Daniel Whitney in Pawnee, Neb., said “It’s not like I didn’t live the lifestyle.
“I grew up on a pig farm in southeast Nebraska, moved to Florida when I was 16, went to college in Georgia. All my friends from 16 on were Southerners. And there was really no difference between how they grew up and how I grew up. They were all small-town kids.”
Does it mean anything?
“Whether it’s NASCAR or country music today, I can go to any part of the country and see people who have absolutely no connection to the South identifying with the South,” said Tim Wise, author of “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.”
“You see some extreme version of that,” Wise said from his home in Nashville. “I can go to Montana or California and see trucks with Confederate flags.”
The relationship of troubling economic and political realities to pop-culture trends remains a thicket. And there’s a deconstruction site just aching to be built around the political corrective used to make “blue collar” and “redneck” synonyms.
But then, the hawking of the authentic is tricky. The ongoing success of this Southern-inflected blue-collar road trip rides on its performers wrenching the attitude from a history of defensive racism while keeping some defiant edge.
Country music’s self-proclaimed “Redneck Woman” Gretchen Wilson gets this. And the music video of her slamming through a creek on an ATV while exclaiming the joys of Christmas lights strung yearlong and Tanya Tucker songs is better than a redneck girl-power anthem: It’s a gal-power hoot. Period.
Ricky Bobby and a snaggle-toothed tow truck aren’t threatening. And while Larry’s an unabashed redneck with some ignorant positions, he’d never wear a sheet and a hood. He wears jeans that show his rear end.
Call it hick shtick.
“At WTW, we stay true to our roots,” begins the preamble to whitetrashworld.com.
“We’re proud of our lifestyle and have no problem showing it off to the world. White Trash World is a growing phenomenon – it’s like an empty beer can rolling down a windy street: It can’t be stopped! It’s our duty to seek out our own and keep our world growing, similar to that Big Bang thing. We’re everywhere! That’s right – we may be headed to your neck of the woods next!”
Popular entertainment is a weird pond to go fishing for pristine meaning in. It’s stocked with characters with wondrous or monstrous hybrids. You’re more likely to hook a catfish than a trout.
Popular culture is also a scavenger, taking in all manner of material on its way to becoming tasty food for thought. So grab that Blue Collar souvenir church key and ponder some more, as you pop the cap on a icy PBR.
