Is 'Hillbilly' Humor Offensive?
Oct. 29, 2003 -- Rachel Rubin collects what offends her, such as a "Fight inbreeding, ban country music" bumper sticker. "Let's see: Incest, funny or not funny?" she says.
She has salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like poor whites in rags. And perhaps the worst item in her cache, Rubin says, is a set of rotting costume "hillbilly" teeth. "I can't think of any instances where it's OK to make fun of someone who lacks medical care," says Rubin, an American studies professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
Rubin belongs to a steadily growing group of academics and activists who want politically correct consideration for poor and rural whites. They see a double standard at play that makes phrases like "hillbillies," "rednecks," "hicks," "white trash," and "trailer trash" socially acceptable, unlike epithets aimed at other groups.
"The reason they are acceptable is that they're about white people and not seen as racist and derogatory," says Anthony Harkins, history professor at Western Kentucky University and author of the forthcoming book Hillbilly: The Cultural History of an American Icon. "We tend to degrade people of lower class in general."
Expressions like "redneck" and "white trash" are interchangeable these days, although they have different origins. "Redneck," for example, once described people who work outside in the sun. "That doesn't apply anymore," Rubin said. "What it really means is class."
Foxworthy: ‘You’re Laughing at Somebody’
The fledgling "hillbilly lobby" had its greatest victory to date when protests stymied the planned CBS reality television show, The Real Beverly Hillbillies. The show, eventually back-burnered by CBS, would have placed a poor Appalachian family Jed Clampett-style in a Beverly Hills mansion.
The comedian Jeff Foxworthy, most famous for his "You Might Be a Redneck" jokes, said he was doubtful when he heard about the premise of The Real Beverly Hillbillies. "I thought, oh, you're laughing at somebody," he told ABCNEWS.com.
"I think sometimes the perception is that if you gave these people a ton of money and an education that they would then become different," Foxworthy said. "Whereas, I have found they do not dislike their lives. Everybody would like to have a few more dollars. But they like their lives and friends, whether it's NASCAR, bowhunting, whatever. For somebody to make fun of it, it's not OK."
Foxworthy, who defines "redneck" as a "glorious absence of sophistication," has never been the subject of protests, despite the subject of his humor. His audience knows his "redneck" jokes are inspired by his own experience, he said.
"It's no character I have to get into," he said. "It's kind of like giving people the ability to say, 'Yeah, that's the way I am and I don't have to be ashamed.'"
Take Your Pick of ‘Trashy’ Images
The Real Beverly Hillbillies may never see primetime, but for those trying to take the trash out of "white trash," popular culture is replete with other images that may or may not offend.
Coming soon to Fox, a Hilton heiress and Lionel Richie's daughter plop into Altus, Ark., for the reality television show The Simple Life. For the show's taping, the wealthy city girls reportedly milked cows and worked at a Sonic drive-in. One 11-year-old local told a newspaper reporter about the filming: "They're making fun of us. … They were saying, 'They're so totally poor.'"
The Mullets, a sitcom that UPN just canceled, depicted "blue-collar, wrestling-loving, light-hearted, optimistic brothers" Dwayne and Denny Mullet, "who don the hairstyle that bears their surname (business in the front, party in the back)," according to the network Web site.
The Mullet hairstyle, also called the Tennessee Tophat, the Camaro cut or beaver paddle, has been a familiar punch-line in recent years synonymous with rural or working-class whites. It inspired a Web site "Mullets Galore" that has been widely circulated on the Internet.
On The Simpsons, neighbor Cletus "a.k.a. the Slack-Jawed Yokel" fathered 26 children and has been known to say, "We're eatin' dinner tonight!" before rattling off the names of every child.
Urban "hipsters" these days drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, wear foam-front trucker hats and put their wallets on chains. "Cross-dressing" is what sociologist Matt Wray calls this phenomenon. "The rich are always rediscovering the poor," he says. "They're consuming it like any other icon or cultural good without knowing or caring anything about the experience.'"
In the video game Trailer Park Tycoon, players strategize to make their park successful by adding amenities such as pink flamingos, hot tubs and piles of tires.
Nickelodeon's popular program for 'tweens, The Amanda Show, features a segment called "Hillbilly Moment," in which a pair of bumpkin-esque cartoon characters beat each other with things like beavers, rag dolls and bowling pins.
Of course, these images — not, by all means, a complete list — are intended to entertain. And many people are quick to say that political correctness often puts a damper on harmless fun.
"I think people have to start lightening up and accepting life," said Sharon Reynolds, 55 of Fayette, Idaho. "People have gotten too touchy about things."
Reynolds is organizing a "Redneck Olympics" in her town to raise money for the local Lions Club. Activities will include cowchip and hubcap throws, a pickup truck show, a hipwader contest and mud volleyball.
But Reynolds doesn't think she's ridiculing anyone by using the word "redneck." She has lived in the South, now lives along the rural Idaho-Oregon border, and believes she's earned the right to tell "redneck" jokes.
"Everybody has their own language," she said. "I couldn't make a joke about someone from Boston. It depends on the person."
Foxworthy agrees with Reynolds' assessment of the rules of humor. "If I went on Def Comedy Jam and was doing black jokes, that would not be funny," he said. "George Lopez can do Latin-American jokes, that's because that's who George is."
Fears of Leaving the Interstate
Today's images of poor white Southerners, and rural whites in general, have deep roots in popular culture. The notorious Hatfield and McCoy feud in the late 19th century ignited the American imagination about "savage" mountaineers and served as legendary fodder for yellow journalism.
Going back to the 1930s, the popular comic strip Li'l Abner celebrated the fictional mountain town Dogpatch and the hulking but simple-minded son of Mammy and Pappy Yokum.
The popular original Beverly Hillbillies program debuted in 1962. The Dukes of Hazzard, which aired on CBS from 1979 to 1985, featured the Dixie-whistling car General Lee, a moonshine-making uncle and a crooked sheriff who said things like, "Roscoe, I'll be your 'itty-bitty buddy' when possums make love to hound dogs."
But the darkest modern image of the backwoods, and perhaps the one that made the most lasting impression, came with the movie Deliverance in 1972. The guitar-banjo riff that opens the film has been shorthand ever since for what happens to city folk when they get lost in the woods — sodomy and general horror.
"Deliverance is the most influential image that there's ever been in the modern period," Harkins said. "That's what I think a whole lot of people think the rural South is. Get out of the civilized world and you're going to be surrounded by these people."
Just as Deliverance was crafting a violent image of rural men in the 1970s, though, Southern men started "taking back" some of the names and images stereotyping them, says sociologist Wray.
"Redneck was effectively recuperated by white men in the South, much in the same way other minoritized groups have taken the epithets against them and turned them into badges of pride," says Wray, a University of Nevada professor and co-editor of the book White Trash: Race and Class in America
This pride in rural and working-class identity enabled the rise of entertainers like Foxworthy, Wray says. Country music and NASCAR racing, both Southern traditions, also became big business with "cross-over appeal" in the last 20 years.
Political Correctness Shrinks Pool of Jokes
But it's only in the last year or so that the "hillbilly lobby" has organized enough to quash an offending television show in the same way other groups have organized in recent decades.
In the early 1950s, for example, the NAACP protested the Amos 'n' Andy TV show as a return to minstrelsy. Italian-Americans protested mobster depictions in the 1971 movie The Godfather, and more recently sued the producers of HBO's The Sopranos. And the women's movement brought a turn away from "dumb wife" jokes and one-dimensional portrayals of women as bimbos, whores or matrons.
Politically correct America has few "safe" groups to poke fun at these days. The white poor is still one of them, Wray said.
Just about every television show about lower-class whites, with the exception of Roseanne Barr's blue-collar comedy Roseanne, has reduced people to stereotypes, he said.
"They're all designed to showcase the pathologies of poor white people for middle-class viewers," he said. "It's a foil for suburban or urban classes who can effectively feel superior to poor whites."
For Chris Duerr, who lives in the farming community of Leon, Iowa, he'll take his rural, working-class humor from comics like Foxworthy and the other comedians on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which grossed more than $15 million in two years and has been turned into a concert film.
Duerr saw the "blue collar" comics in Des Moines when the tour first started in 2000, and has a knack for remembering Foxworthy's "redneck" jokes.
"It's funnier if you have somebody who can relate to it who's making the joke," he said. Duerr, 35, remembers seeing another comedian in a local club telling a joke about Southerners, and it wasn't quite as funny.
"At first I thought, that's not really a nice comment, I thought it was slightly offensive," he said. "But then I said consider the source. I tend to say life is too short."