Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2014 | Page 19

15 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