Redneck Nation (26 page)

The proof of redneck media dominance isn’t in the fact that television sucks. Television has always sucked. The same 1961
TV season that featured
Omnibus
and Ernie Kovacs had a minor hit called
The Hathaways
, starring Peggy Cass, Jack Weston, and a troupe of theatrical monkeys. Imagine a pre-evolutionary version of
The Partridge Family
(but with better music), and you’ve got the idea.

What’s strange is not the badness of television, always our lowest-common-denominator medium, but rather the style and quality
of the badness it currently exhibits. There are so many ways for TV to suck, who would have imagined it would suck the southern
way?

In 1961, one might have predicted a television future filled with boring news shows, turgid documentaries, and self-serving
conversations among pompous yet insignificant
pseudo-celebrities living in Manhattan. But PBS wasn’t created until the Johnson administration.

Forty years ago, one might have feared a future of bland, forgettable sitcoms, or vacuous variety shows, or nonstop westerns,
or even, worst-case scenario, a national TV network based around
Hee Haw
, a wildly popular syndicated show across the South (and in the Graham household) when I was a kid. But the worst
Hee Haw
-inspired nightmares can’t match the truth, the “reality,” of the suckitude of modern American television. The
Hee Haw
gang may have lacked savoir faire and
je ne sais quoi
, but they never set themselves on fire, covered themselves with mucus, or videotaped the vaginal penetration of a member
of the livestock family—though they were no doubt sorely tempted.

Such programming may sound like country, but it’s really rock ‘n roll. Or to be more precise: MTV.

MTV’s
Jackass
was an entire program wholeheartedly dedicated to the traditional southern belief in the entertainment value of gross stupidity.
The premise is simple: A group of young twenty-something guys hit the road in search of the line where stupidity equals death.
Then they straddle that line, with tape rolling.

The head idiot—a loathsome troglodyte from Tennessee calling himself Johnny Knoxville—arranged for his pals to lie down on
barbecue grills, snort worms up their noses and vomit them back out, get sprayed by skunks, attacked by bulls, beaten with
guitars, and run over by various modes of transportation—naked, if possible.

Jackass
was wildly popular. (As of this writing, Knoxville and Co. are producing specials and other programming for MTV to keep the
nausea alive.) And, like
The Glutton Bowl
, the show drew lots of viewers but little comment from media observers… until the ambulances arrived. At least four
Jackass
imitators harmed themselves seriously during the show’s first incarnation—none of them south of the Mason-Dixon. (There was
one report out of Kentucky about a young man asking his friends to run him over, but that turned out to be a local idiot who
didn’t
need the inspiration of cable television to break his own neck.)

One thirteen-year-old Yankee
Jackass
wanna-be dressed up in a fire-retardant suit, covered it with steaks, and lay across a hot charcoal grill. He suffered second-degree
burns. Another thirteen-year-old suffered second-and third-degree burns after two friends poured gasoline on his legs and
feet and then set them on fire following the show. He was later listed in critical but stable condition in the burn unit of
Boston’s Shriners Hospital.

“Sure, Michael,” I can hear you saying, “but those aren’t rednecks, they’re
teenagers
. And all teenagers are under constant assault from their glands. The fact that sixteen-year-old boys like watching people
acting like idiots doesn’t prove anything. They also think it’s cool to have a metal stud shoved through their tongues.”

To which I reply, “Pig rectums!”

No, that’s not an anachronistic southern epithet. I mean, literally, porcine poopers, animal anuses, barnyard buttholes. When
NBC’s hit series
Fear Factor
featured close-ups of folks eating these usually discarded pork products, they snagged their highest ratings of the season.
As contestants swallowed the recta down, network ratings went straight up. Not long after that, NBC had folks bobbing for
chicken feet buried under a pile of live worms.

“Hey, Ma—what’s in them TV dinners? Spaghetti and chicken nuggets? Yum!”

It may sound like a prime-time game show on the Deliverance Television Network, but
Fear Factor
is a jewel in NBC’s broadcasting crown. It’s a coast-to-coast hit with high ratings and even higher profits. It’s not hard
to find contestants, either. Americans from the redneck backwaters of Long Island and Detroit beg, plead, and audition for
a chance to flop around in vats of rancid squid or get lowered into a tank of water snakes or lie down in the path of swarming
rats (no, not the kind in charge of programming at NBC Entertainment—the short, furry kind).

In exchange, the players get the opportunity to behave repulsively on national television, demonstrate a complete lack of
self-respect, and, maybe, win $50,000. Someone call my old boss Red Winburn, quick! There’s a network that wants to sign you
to a development deal.

Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment, says there is a perfectly good explanation for why this network shows humans
interacting with manure during prime time: “The audience wants these shows.” He is absolutely right. And he’s not talking
about an audience limited to the residents of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, or the city limits of Beckley, West Virginia,
either.

In the interest of fairness, let it be noted for the record that not everything on television is as bad as
Fear Factor
or
Survivor V: Trapped in the Washington, D.C., Public School System
. There are still shows celebrating intellectual vigor, like the syndicated show
Jeopardy!
and its sister program,
Wheel of Fortune
, a.k.a.
Jeopardy! for Stupid People
.

There are apparently millions of Americans astonished
by spelling, who work just as hard finding a place for a “p” in the word “pneumonia” as a typical
Jeopardy!
contestant taking “Tenth-Century Japanese Poetry for $500.” And which of the two shows is the more popular?

Please.
Wheel of Fortune
holds the record for the longest-running game show to hold the number one spot in TV syndication history, nearly nine hundred
weeks. Yes, nine hundred weeks of puzzled Americans staring at the missing letters in a common word or phrase and muttering
to themselves, “Hmmm, Hunchback of Rotor Dame? No, Motor Dame? Maybe it’s the Hunchback of Boater Dame—that’s it!”

For a time, however, the monster quiz show in America was
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
, which slammed into the summer ratings like a tsunami in 1999. Those of us longing for more intellectually engaging TV fare
took its popularity as a good sign. Sure, the questions were, shall we say, less than challenging—actual question: A person
known for their fashion sense is known as a fashion (A) bowl, (B) fork, (C) saucer, (D) plate?—but at least regular folks
were trying to show some mental heft. With
Millionaire
, as opposed to
Wheel of Fortune
, there was some sense that people who could answer the truly tough ones in the millionaire rounds deserved to walk away with
a sack of cash. It was a show where knowledge equaled wealth, and any programming suggesting such a connection is an inherently
good thing.

Not to belabor the point, but this is significant: Folks on
Millionaire
try hard not to look stupid. While
Jackass
and
Fear Factor
and
Funniest Home Videos
seemed to celebrate the idea of getting rich quick through idiocy, the contestants on
Millionaire
seem to buy into the notion
that it is, in fact, possible to be too stupid. Players on
Millionaire
didn’t celebrate their ignorance. They were frustrated by it.

One reason might have been the modesty of the questions. Nobody expects to know all the answers when Alex Trebek whips out
the stack of cards for categories like “Infectious Diseases” and “Great Moments in Opera.” But on
Millionaire
, when dopey lounge act Regis Philbin asks how many U.S. senators each state has, you can see the look of disgust on the puzzled
contestant’s face. “Ah, c’mon,” he’s thinking to himself, “I oughta know this!”

It was a small thing, a thin shaft of light, but many of us seized it as a hopeful indicator. Then
Millionaire’s
ratings began to slip. The folks at ABC Television started scrambling. What was missing? What would it take to keep people
watching a quiz show? Smarter contestants? Tougher questions? Topless dancers? No, wait! We’ve got it:

Deadly, poisonous spiders!

And thus the torture chamber quiz show was born: first ABC’s
The Chair
, then Fox’s
The Chamber
, and eventually, one assumes,
The Spanish Inquisition
, a joint venture of the History Channel and the S&M Network, brought to you each week by Advil and the Jesuit Society of
America.

In the 1950s and ’60s, quiz shows featured men and women of letters—college professors, historians, writers—to delight and
amaze us with their knowledge. There was some sense that viewers wanted to be entertained by people smarter than the folks
back home: Charles Van Doren, Kitty Carlisle, and the like.

The quiz show challenge today is to keep the viewer from feeling stupid, not easy in a nation where 73 percent
of the public think the Gettysburg Address is the name of a new spy thriller by Robert Ludlum. So the questions can’t be too
tough. At the same time, watching a bunch of people answer questions like “How many digits are in your phone number…
without
the area code?” is hardly compelling. That’s where the tarantulas come in.

On ABC’s
The Chair
, contestants were strapped to a bit of furniture borrowed from a Texas gas chamber, attached to various monitors, and forced
to answer questions like “Which motel chain has the sleepy bear in pajamas as its mascot?” while the producers lowered spiders
into their faces or sicced alligators on them. Not only must the victims (“players’ certainly isn’t the right word) answer
the questions, but they also had to maintain a low and steady heart rate.

Finally a TV show that combines the pleasures of a doctor’s visit, the excitement of a trip to the zoo, and the intellectual
challenges of your third grader’s homework—now, that’s what I call entertainment!

Which, actually, it is, if your standard for entertainment is shooting beer cans off your best friend’s head or watching the
director’s-cut DVD of
Smokey and the Bandit 3
. This is precisely the dumbed-down culture I fled when I left the South. And now it’s on prime time.

I remember once as a young teen sitting in our living room watching Woody Allen’s
Sleeper
on ABC’s Saturday night movie. Some of my dad’s family were in from Horry County—a particularly rural part of South Carolina—and
they were all huddled in the kitchen over a pot of coffee and hot servings of the latest family gossip. Whenever one of them
came through the living room, he would stop,
look at the TV screen for a minute, look at me, then shake his head and say, “What is that junk you’re watching?”

How could I explain to them that this wasn’t a TV program, it was a lifeline. I had never seen anything like Woody Allen before.
My parents would no more have taken me to a Woody Allen movie than to a public circumcision. He was one of “them,” by which
they didn’t mean “Jew,” but much worse: “Yankee.” He was some fast-talking New Yorker making fun of God, Country, and My Baby,
and represented a kind of art and entertainment we had no use for.

And I loved it. I was astonished by it. I remember a few times looking around to make sure I didn’t get “caught,” though I
couldn’t say what it was I was doing wrong. I felt the way Richard Wright describes following his first encounter with H.
L. Mencken:

Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen,
consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of
people, mocking God, authority.… It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody
had the courage to say it. Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room.

I didn’t know who Woody Allen was, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get away with these jokes about famous, important
people, about religion, or especially about [stage whisper] S-E-X. And even more amazing, he
was on TV. He was actually
popular
. Somewhere far from my head-shaking family was a place where Woody Allen’s comedy was as well accepted around the kitchen
table as “kuntry komic” Jerry Clower was around mine.

Maybe if we’d had
Jackass
when I was sixteen, I would have been a fan, who knows? When I was a teenager, I loved idiotic, counterculture, adult-annoying
entertainment, too. In fact, I was (and remain) a huge fan of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, which appeared regularly on public television in South Carolina until someone started explaining the jokes to our legislators.
I read Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller and John Irving and laughed up my sleeve at the adults around me—teachers, coaches, even
my very own parents—all of them ignorant of the subversive movement I had joined.

I had Steve Martin and Woody Allen and, thanks to a really hip high school band teacher, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. For
knockdown, lowbrow humor, the film
Animal House
was for me a celluloid cry for cultural revolution—hey, the drunken perverts can be the good guys!

Steve Martin was particularly influential on my decision to become a comedian because he was smart, silly, and wildly successful
all at once. Steve Martin was intelligent and irrational and insightful and bizarre and gasping-for-breath funny all at the
same time. He filled concert halls, he wrote goofy songs, he told jokes about philosophy, and he changed the life of a lost
teenager sitting by a turntable in a small, prefab home in rural South Carolina.