You Might Be A Redneck If …

Yes, true believers. I did it. I went after America’s number one sacred cow in this week’s edition of Room 19 Comics. There is no celebrity, big or small, that can escape my poison pen as Jeff Foxworthy gets a direct hit to the breadbasket. Take that patron saint of redneck funny men! Ha!

Ok, the above paragraph is a little over done, but I figured that I should put something funny up here. All in all, this is a neat little strip and I think it makes my point about lowest common denominator humor. For the last three or four years, redneck humor has grown in popularity. From Foxworthy to Larry the Cable Guy, these jokers and their country-fried yokels have been making their humor known.

And you know what it, it sucks. The jokes are stupid, their points are border-line racist and it just divides America even more. I know that they’ll say it is in response to the explosion in popularity to the comedy flick, “The Original Kings of Comedy” with Bernie Mac, Cedric the Entertainer, DL Hughley and Steve Harvey. All four guys got movie and TV deals out the flick, so it’s not surprising that other people tried to rip it off (The Original Queens of Comedy, The Latin Kings of Comedy, etc.). The main difference is that at least one of those guys (Mac) is really fucking funny, the others are ok. The imitators all sucked and eventually died out.

You’ll see what I’m talking about here: www.room19comics.com.

Not the hick bunch. These guys just keep going and going and going with the same jokes and the same observations. It sucks. David Cross got into a great pissing match with Larry the Cable Guy on his site www.bobanddavid.com and it was pretty interesting. And I’m not trying to pick on just one group of people, I hate how our country is just becoming too niche-orientated.

Every genre and subgenre has its own group of celebrities and those people have to shit on other people to get their props and it’s just boring. And yes, I realize the irony of me crying about ragging on another group of people when I just spent three paragraphs explaining that I hate redneck humor.

Back to the strip, this was actually going to be a two-paneled strip when Eddie asks Layne what he’s watching. I decided that there was no way that any college kid would be watching “The Blue Collar Comedy Tour” unless there was a good reason, so I had him sacked out on the couch trying to sleep off a hangover.

By the way, when I was in college I was real pumped to get drunk one night, only we didn’t have anything to drink, so I actually funneled what was left of the Goldschlager (which is cinnamon schnapps with flecks of gold in it). It hit me like a ton of bricks and I was able to get drunk on a shoe-string budget. So kids, let that be a lesson to you … you can get drunk if you use some ingenuity.

So the first two panels are used as a set up to the main joke. The perspective is a bit off in the second panel because I was attempting to do it as bird’s eye view of the living room, but it just wasn’t coming out right. That’s one of the things I am attempting to do in these strips, work on different perspectives and ways of viewing the action. With the second and third panels, I think I did a pretty good job. Hopefully this will mean better art in the upcoming strips.

The third panel is Foxworthy’s joke. I was going to use saltier language, but I decided that it would probably best if I didn’t. Layne’s line in the fourth panel actually made me a laugh a bit, and I never laugh at my stuff (which is telling, I suppose). I am pretty sure that Foxworthy isn’t a racist by any means, and if truth be told, Larry the Cable Guy is more of the person I wanted to target in this strip, though he isn’t as well known.

So there you have it, my take on rural humor.

If there’s one thing that I want you to take away from this Blog is how much I love to use ellipses. As a punctuation, they are so underused it is almost criminal. Besides me, the only person who seems to use them at all is my dad and he goes buckwild with them in his emails.

Does that mean that I’m turning into my dad? Despite my protests, there are days when I definitely am. I can just see the way I’m acting, the way I laugh, what makes me laugh, etc and all of a sudden I’m Mike Magrane. Not that that is a bad thing. Actually, my father is a pretty great guy and if there is one man that I’d like to turn in to, I guess it would be him.

One of the reasons why I’m so hesitant to be him is because I think I may lose my identity. However, then I start thinking that maybe my identity was that of my dad and that his identity was of his father, and his father of his father and so on … (ellipses!) Maybe all of us interacting with each other every day are essentially reruns of interactions of a generation ago. If that is the case than nothing is really new and we’re just on a cycle going around and around and around.

Just what does form your personality?

Enough with the philosophy crap. The past week hasn’t been so bad, Aly and I started packing up the homestead and are looking forward to what the future brings us in Coolidge Corner. Friday night we signed the purchasing and sale agreement, I wrote the largest check that I probably ever will, then we ate Chinese food and watched a movie (“House of Sand and Fog” … meh, not that great). Not exactly the Hollywood ending of buying your first home, but that’s what we did.

Saturday, we went to Ryan’s house and watched the Pats kick ass. Great second half by the Patriots. I don’t know where they’re going in the playoffs, but if they play that well, it will be far. We also found out that the person we wanted to rent our apartment to was approved. That was a huge load off both of our backs.

We also went furniture shopping on Saturday and Sunday. That’s was as fun as it sounds.