Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Ten: Still Fertile Ground

- 257 Still Fertile Ground O ne danger in trying to be too current is that the definition of current changes daily. For this reason, this book is concerned with rural comedy of the twentieth century; we are not far enough into the twenty-first to ascertain where it will go from here. In this closing, however, we can make a few observations and wrap up a few loose ends. When people speak of “country comedy” today, they are usually referring to the acts of stand-up comedians such as Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Ron White, Dan “Larry the Cable Guy” Whitney, and Etta May (whose publicity describes her as “Minnie Pearl with a migraine”). A close dissection of their routines reveals that while they do have some similarities with what has come before, their humor is not so much rural as it is redneck. Many people probably cannot distinguish between the two, but those who have struggled this far have probably noticed that quite a definite difference indeed exists. “Rural,” as exemplified by the shows and characters profiled in the past nine chapters, usually took the form of hillbillies in the mountains, with their cabins, moonshine stills, battles with revenooers , and distrust of anyone from the outside world. The secondmost -common strain was the genteel small town of Lum and Abner’s Pine Ridge, Scattergood Baines’s Coldriver, or The Andy Griffith Show’s Mayberry, just to name a few. These locales were rural simply by virtue of being located well outside the influence of any large city, but the residents were not necessarily as barbaric as the feudin’ and Chapter Ten - 258 fightin ’ hillbilly image. Other series, such as the Ma and Pa Kettle films, fell somewhere in between. Now, take another look at those redneck comedians. They try to project the background of the low-income suburban trailer park rather than that of the hills or farms or idyllic small towns. The comics are far more likely to be found with a beer from Wal-Mart in hand than a jug of homemade corn squeezins. We could get into an even deeper discussion of the frequently controversial and even scatological topics of their jokes, but that point might not necessarily be valid, since these redneck humorists operate in a media world with far less censorship than the earlier comedians encountered. (Some of the old-timers possessed a sense of humor as raunchy as anyone’s, but their acts were squeaky clean as a consequence of the attitudes of the time. Would they have performed off-color material if they had been allowed to do so? There is no way to know for sure.) That said, programmers occasionally have attempted to bring old-time rural sitcoms into the present, and not just in the form of the reunion movies, which by their very nature had to strive to duplicate the style of the original shows. No, the trend in big-budget theatrical films such as The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) has been to completely reimagine the premise as if the original source material had never existed. Reaction from critics and the even-more-important paying audiences has been mixed, to say the least. As part of the fallout from the same emphasis on a more youthful culture that doomed CBS’s rural sitcom lineup in 1971, these new theatrical films generally end up with the characters appearing much younger than their television predecessors. In the Beverly Hillbillies feature, for example, Jed Clampett was portrayed by Jim “Ernest” Varney. Although Varney was the same age Buddy Ebsen was when he assumed the role, Ebsen’s makeup was designed to make him look much older. Established screen villain Dabney Coleman was suitably avaricious as Mr. Drysdale, but again, Coleman lacked Raymond Bailey’s patina of seniority. The true triumph of the film was Cloris Leachman’s performance as Granny, which nearly everyStill Fertile Ground - 259 one agreed was so similar to Irene Ryan that it bordered on eerie. Hillbillies creator Paul Henning wanted it made perfectly clear that he was in no way connected with the feature film—his involvement went no further than his licensing of his characters. He especially wanted to distance himself from the added touches such as having the Clampetts stop their truck to pick up roadkill to eat for lunch, or the infamous gag in which they mistake the...