Flowers can also be troublesome. Sometimes fans bring me bouquets, which is nice, but please, not in the middle of a show. Women get really upset if I don’t come down to the front of the stage, pick up the flowers, and acknowledge them. (Not that they aren’t appreciated by my wife when I act like I bought them for her.) Also, unlike panties, flowers are not easy to pick up with the microphone. And when I’m setting up for a punch line, it’s not time to be putting anything in a vase.
I confess: I have occasionally used my celebrity to get things I wanted. I’m not talking about being able to get a table at a high-class restaurant—without a reservation. More like getting my car repaired. You see, I own a lemon. This car breaks down more than little Ricky Schroeder in the movie The Champ. I have even had dreams of it being stolen. I’m not a yelling guy or a throwing-things guy, but I was so pissed off at the damn thing never working that all of a sudden I found myself saying to the service manager, “You know, this car’s been in here eight times, and if we don’t get it fixed now I think I’m just gonna have to write a bit about it and go on the Tonight Show and tell everybody in America and the free world what a piece-of-crap car you guys make.” Meanwhile, I could hear myself thinking, “What kind of threat is this? Listen to yourself, you dumbass.”
It got fixed, though. Thank God. I didn’t want to write the bit.
By far the best use of celebrity status is on airplanes. You can get that first-class seat on the upgrade, no matter who is waiting in line. They’ll do it for you in a second. You walk up to the counter, lay down your boarding pass, and go, “Are there any more seats available in first class.”
The person behind the counter will say, “Well, there’s a long waiting list and…”
Then they take a look at you.
“Ohhh, yeah, I believe we do have one more seat up front.”
I’ve always been proud to be one of the common people, but when I started flying in first class…well, anybody who thinks that all men are created equal has never flown in the front of the plane. It only took me about 2 million miles to realize that I did want to escape from coach class. Now when sitting in that big, comfortable, leather seat, wondering if it’s okay to take home my personal salt and pepper shakers from dinner, I have the overwhelming urge to jump out of my seat, rip open the curtain, poke my head into the netherworld of coach seating, and laugh and shout, “They’re puttin on the steaks now! And we’re having ice cream sundaes for dessert. Ha. Ha. Ha!”
The best part of flying first class is that it’s all free. “Sir, would you like another complimentary cocktail? Free headsets, anyone?” Well, some of it is free. Actually, it should be free considering that the difference in price between a coach ticket and a first-class fare is greater than the gross national product of most third world nations. We get the leg room and the butt room, and it only costs $1,200 more. Bet you thought celebrities didn’t pay a price for being able to afford the ultimate in luxury. Of course we do. I just can’t figure out if we pay because we’re famous or we’re famous because we can pay.
If you’re famous, people laugh louder at your jokes. Travis Tritt once told me, “It’s funny: You get your own tour bus and people laugh a little harder at everything you say.”
It’s not necessarily fair. People also tend to think you’re smarter. Somehow your IQ goes up. They figure that if you were smart enough to figure out how to get a job entertaining them, then you must have something on the ball. Some do, but let me tell you: A lot of idiots get famous. But only an idiot would name names.
One thing I don’t do is spend any time thinking that I want to be more famous. In fact, being famous every other day would be just fine. I could show Entertainment Tonight my home on one day, and the next I could go out without washing my hair.
Of course, when I run out unwashed and wearing my crappy clothes, I’m sure to run into somebody with whom I went to high school. Suddenly there’s the girl I had a crush on in tenth grade, who would never speak to me. She recognizes me. I can see it in the way her eyes light up that she has lived every day of the past fifteen years believing that she made a big mistake ignoring me and dating the varsity quarterback instead. Since graduation he’s fathered her children, consumed a minibrewery’s worth of bad beer, and never made it out of the shoe department at Wal-Mart. Meanwhile, she’s followed my career and kept scrapbooks. I open my mouth to speak. Then she takes a good look at my raggedy sweatpants and the Braves T-shirt that’s three sizes too small, and she thinks, “Maybe I did the right thing marrying Kyle.”
I don’t think this alternate-day celebrity plan is such a good idea after all.
My sister, Jennifer, doesn’t think of me as a celebrity. But she likes the fact that other people do because through me she can meet famous people. She went to the Country Music Awards and she thought it was bizarre that her big brother Jeff would be there. That is, until Alan Jackson walked up. Then it was okay because I could say, “Alan, this is my sister.”
One of the weirdest things about being famous is that I now have relatives I didn’t have just a couple of years ago. But amazingly, they never call my brother or my sister or my mom. They just call me. I don’t want to embarrass them here by telling you their names. (Though you’d think that after having the nerve to call me they could stand a little shame.) Let’s just say they’re cousins so far removed that they might as well live on the other side of the international date line. They’ve read that I’m now making money, so they call and say, “We jus’ wan’ keep the family together.” I nodded in agreement and said, “What’s your name again?”
I remember one conversation with a lovely woman:
“Well, it’s so nice to see you’re doing so well, Jeff. Things hadden been quite so good for us since Harlan hurt his back. Mama’s been in and out of the hospital and what-have-you. You know, God, it looks like we’re gonna lose the farm. Sure would be nice if somebody in the family could buy it—you know, for sentimental reasons.”
When these “relatives” call they also feel obliged to give my number to somebody else. So when I’ve finally got that rare two hours at home with my kids, I end up spending thirty fascinating minutes on the phone with Wayne Hutton.
“Hey! I’m a distant cousin of your Uncle Mike. We’s wunderin’, if we come out to California, we talkin’ about stoppin’ by and see y’all a little bit. You know, just throw the kids out in the yard, shoot the shit for a while.”
“Who are you?”
“Well, we love ya whole family. We’ve always been crazy about yer mama.”
“But who are you?”
“Wayne Hutton, boy! Didn’ I tell you?”
Afterward I called my mother. She said, “Seems to me like there was a cousin Wayne…”
These people show up at my concerts, too. They call my manager’s office and say, “Hey, when Jeff comes to Missouri, tell him he’s got some kinfolks out here and we’d like for him to come to dinner, if that’d be aright. He can just come out. Hell, you can come too if you want. By the way, we’s wondering if we might get a few tickets fer the show.”
“Well, how many do you need?”
“Oh, ’bout forty-five’ll do it.”
Afterward, they get mad if I won’t come to the house. Frankly, I’m kind of scared to leave with them. Scared I may not come back.
Atlanta, being my hometown, is the most fun place for me to play. It’s also the most aggravating. Every time I swear I will never do it again. Everybody with whom I went to elementary school, high school, and college wants to come to the show. Everybody I hung out with while I was single, worked with at IBM, ever dated (and now their husbands and kids), and every schoolteacher I had—all want to come to the show, God bless them. I get twenty complimentary tickets a night, I end up buying another hundred and fifty, and there are still always fifty people pissed off at me. Maybe what I’ll do is this: JEFF FOXWORTHY, ONE NIGHT ONLY. THE PEOPLE-I-KNOW SHOW. Then they can feed me material from their seats. “Hey, tell ’em about th
e time…”
When my first book, You Might Be a Redneck If…, came out, I finally had an inkling that my fortunes were improving. My family stopped telling me that I might eventually have to go back to my job at IBM. The lines at the malls were often as long for my book-signings as they were for the House of Venison “young buck” specials. I remember my mother telling me that she had the book at the family Christmas party. She said she stood in the middle of the room, reading the one-liners out loud, and everyone laughed. But on every third joke, all of a sudden, somebody wouldn’t laugh—because they’d realized that the joke was about them.
“I started to read that one about ‘if your junior-senior prom had a day care center…’” my mother said, “and all I could think about was your cousin Tracy sitting over there in the corner, and how she and Bob got married cause she got pregnant in the tenth grade.”
I finally had to tell her, “Where do you think I come up with this stuff, Mom?”
Fans have heard me talk about my wife forever. Sometimes when we’re out together, they’d rather talk to Gregg than to me.
Often when I play someplace and we know people in town, they’ll invite Gregg to sit with them in the audience. She won’t do that anymore. She says people end up not laughing every time I say something about her. That’s because they turn to see how she’s going to react.
You know, folks, it’s not like she hasn’t heard these jokes before. Almost every one of them began with me asking for her reaction. Our entire life is me coming out of the shower going, “Is this funny?”
It just hurts when she says yes before I’ve even told the joke. (Don’t you make believe you don’t know exactly what I mean.)
Being well known hasn’t really affected my kids yet. They don’t give a damn that I’m famous. I could have dinner at the White House, and that’s not going to stop them from getting up seven times during the middle of the night. I’m just dad.
I’ve never really tried to explain my job to my daughters. One reason is that they’re only two and four. But I think my oldest understands. The last time we went to see my wife’s folks, we were walking through the New Orleans airport and she was riding on my shoulders. Somebody came up and wanted an autograph. I stopped—she’s still on my shoulders—and I signed this thing. The guy said, “Thank you,” and shook my hand, and walked off. She said, “Daddy, why do people like you so much?” I said, “I don’t know, Peanut Butter, why do you think?” She said, “Cause you make them laugh.” I turned to Gregg and said, “Wow.”
All entertainers must wear makeup. This is important, especially if you’re a man. For the first time in your life you’ve got something on your face all the time, besides a dumbass grin. But what happens if you leave the set or stage and you forget about it? There are you and your wife standing in the movie line, and all of a sudden it dawns on you: “Oh gosh, I’m still wearing mascara!”
One of the first times I ever wore makeup was when I did Nashville Now on TNN. I lived in Atlanta and I had to drive up to Tennessee to do the show, and then I had to drive back the same night to catch a plane in the morning for a gig somewhere else. Back then they put on heavy makeup. I’m talking the pancake stuff and the thick eyeliner.
I left right after the show and drove back to Atlanta through the north Georgia mountains. Suddenly red lights flashed and I saw a UFO—no, I got pulled over by the cops. I didn’t think anything about it because I was only going about five miles an hour over the speed limit. Then the state trooper came up to the driver’s window and he shined the light in my face. I could see right away that he felt mean. He looked like he’d been cast in Smokey and the Bandit and had been pissed ever since the production left town. I just sat there thinking, “Now, what have I done?”
When he finally spoke, my fears were realized. He said, “You gonna git yer ass outta the car, boy?” I did as he said. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t take the flashlight off my face. I smiled and said, “Well, sir, what was I doing? I realize I was doing like sixty, okay, but I gotta get back to Atlanta and catch a flight tomorrow early, and…God, I’m so sorry…”
“Git yer ass back here to the back!” he said, walking toward the rear of my car. I followed, and then it hit me: “Shit, I’ve got makeup on, in the middle of the night, in the north Georgia mountains, and a cop just pulled me over.” There was only one thing I could do. I stared him straight in the eye and said, “You’re looking at the makeup, aren’t cha?”
His lip curled and he said, “Ye-ah.”
I said, “Lemme explain. I can explain.”
“Ye-ah?”
“I was just on Nashville Now, and I left right from the set and got in the car and started driving. I forgot to take off the makeup.”
He didn’t say anything.
“It’s the God’s honest truth.”
Then he said, “You on Nashville Now? All right, who’s on there tonight?”
“Porter Waggoner.”
“You met Porter Waggoner!”
“Yessir, I sure did.”
“What was he like?”
“Oh, he was as good as gold. Sir.”
“Aright, you kin go.”
This was a rare example of how knowing a celebrity can save your butt. That and telling the truth. Otherwise, I might have ended up as some skeleton that hunters find in the middle of deer season; a collection of bones after the squirrels have already taken the skull away.
You really know you’re a celebrity when manufacturers send you free stuff. You only get this after you reach the point where you can finally afford it on your own. Travis Tritt and I were talking about this on the set of my TV show one day.
He said, “Tony Llama just gave me these boots.”
I said, “Justin gave me these boots. Hell, you should see what I’ve got piled up in my trailer.”
Then we both smiled and looked at each other. We knew what the other guy was thinking: “Where were these people all those years when we couldn’t afford anything?”
What really astounds me about being well known is how my life compares to my circumstances when I was growing up. In October 1995 I was able to charter a Learjet to take me to Atlanta to see the Braves play in the World Series. As we landed the Learjet, which cost a load of money, and taxied down the runway, we passed by the place where I lived, in Hapeville, at the end of the old airport runway. I looked out the window and thought, “That’s where my house was. That house had one bathroom. It had a dirt yard. We burned trash in a barrel. Now I’m roaring past it in a Learjet I just rented to go see one stupid-ass ball game.” So I asked myself, “How did I get from there to here?”
That’s a good question.
I hope in some ways I’ve answered it.
About the Author
Jeff Foxworthy is one of the most respected and successful comedians in the country. He is the largest-selling comedy-recording artist in history, a multiple Grammy Award–nominee, and bestselling author of eleven books. Widely known for his redneck jokes, his act goes well beyond that to explore the humor in everyday family interactions and human nature, a style that has been compared to Mark Twain’s.
Currently he is starring in and executive producing the television series he created for the WB network, Blue Collar TV. Foxworthy also has his own radio show, The Foxworthy Countdown, which is syndicated in more than 220 markets. He is a regular on The Late Show with David Letterman and has an HBO special and two Showtime specials to his credit.
This Georgia native remains true to his southern roots and resides with his wife and two daughters in Atlanta.
Copyright
NO SHIRT. NO SHOES…. NO PROBLEM!. Copyright © 1996 by Jeff Foxworthy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced int
o any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Hyperion e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-1-4013-9465-3
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