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share his discriminating observations as an expert
lifestyle commentator. His audience, for its part, laughs
nervously at one-liners that often strike too close to what
was once home - or what some audience members fear
might be home once again. Foxworthy’s elevation of
himself - and the audience - arises from the mediated
distance he creates from the objects of his redneck
appreciation. In essence, Foxworthy says, “We’re not
them!” while leaving open the possibility that some
audience members could be them (or become a
“redneck” once again). In short, Foxworthy’s humor
relies on the nervous laughter inspired by modem status
anxiety: it’s fun to laugh at the mbes but it’s
embarrassing to recall how closely one avoided being a
hick - and how close to the line of middleclass
respectability one still clings. (273)
Another episode that foregrounds these tensions takes the form
of a “major rite of passage” from his high school years, a late-night
venture to a place known as “Shit Creek,” a “two-mile stretch of woods
through which ran the drain-off from the sewage treatment plant between
Hapeville and Forest Park” (28-29). This site, Foxworthy explains, was
reputed to be the home of two peculiar inhabitants: “See, the mmor was
that Goat People - half person, half goat - lived in the woods. And
Waterhead families: people with really big heads. Supposedly entire
clans of these freaks existed nowhere else in Georgia but in the woods
surrounding Shit Creek” (29). Here again, Foxworthy reveals that there
are those individuals (mythical or otherwise) who occupy a space outside
the realm of decent “country folks,” sub-human figures subsisting on the
margins of society and marked by extreme physical difference. By
evoking these figures, he draws on the common white-trash tropes of
physical deformity (often imagined to be a result of inbreeding),
bestiality, and - again - an association with excrement. In these cases,
the depravity of the characters is manifested in the physical bodies of the
subjects.
Foxworthy dramatizes his own initiation trip: “We’d driven
about a mile into the woods when several guys thought they saw a Goat
Man on the edge of the woods. Then suddenly Ricky’s car broke down in
the middle of the road” (29). The boys get out of the automobile and
prepare to push. “Warily, we all got out on the dirt roa B