Comedian Jeff Foxworthy explains the inspiration behind his latest stand-up comedy special, "The Joke's on Me," and why it will be his last.Show Caption
NEW YORK – In his new stand-up comedy special "The Joke's on Me" (streaming now, Fox Nation), Jeff Foxworthy did something on stage that he hasn't done in 20 years.He told a few "you might be a redneck" jokes. The one-liners, which Foxworthy began cracking in the late 1980s, helped propel the comedian to mainstream stardom in the 90s."As I'm preparing for the special, I knew I wanted to talk about being a granddad because I always talk about my life and my grandson did something that just lent itself to a redneck joke," Foxworthy, 67, tells USA TODAY. "I did my first comedy special in 1990, and I closed it with redneck jokes. This is probably the last one I'm ever going to do, because it's just a lot of work. And I thought, 'Well, if I closed my first one with it, this is 12 [specials] later, might be cool to just tie the knot and bring it full circle."The comedian also teases that he's currently workshopping both a book and a movie script. As he mentions in "The Joke's on Me," Foxworthy is "enjoying this season of life." That includes spending time on his Georgia farm and with his wife of 40 years, Pamela Gregg. They share two daughters and two grandkids."We go to bed talking to each other, we wake up talking to each other," Foxworthy says of how they've stayed together for four decades.They'll celebrate 41 years of marriage this September. "I've got a job that takes me on the road to a different city every night and I still miss her every day."Foxworthy and Gregg met at the Punchline Comedy Club in Atlanta. It was Foxworthy's first comedy gig. At the time, he was fixing computers at IBM, and colleagues entered him into a comedy competition at the club."[Pamela] saw me the first night that I ever did [comedy], and I won the competition," he recalls. "I met my wife and my career within the same hour, which is crazy. Where I came from, it never dawned on me I could do something creative.""The Joke's on Me" serves as both Foxworthy's final stand-up comedy special and a part-documentary. Similar to what other comics have done in recent years, Foxworthy attempts to pull back the curtain on both his life and career by both showing the final product (filmed at the Gas South Theater in Duluth, Georgia) and how he workshopped the jokes (footage is intertwined from a prior gig at the Punchline). Foxworthy and Gregg also sit down together on camera for an interview during the special.How the Beatles inspired Jeff Foxworthy's new comedy specialFoxworthy remembers watching the Peter Jackson-directed three-part docuseries "The Beatles: Get Back." The comedian says that watching the Fab Four work through lyrics and chords "enriched" the documentary's ending when the band performs "Get Back" on a rooftop. It spurred the premise for "The Joke's on Me," as Foxworthy set out to produce "a love letter" to stand-up comedy."People think with stand-up, you're just funny and you walk out there and you talk about what happened that day," Foxworthy says. "But when a comedian finishes a special, you get to enjoy it for about five seconds because you immediately think, 'I just emptied the pantry and now it's bare and I'm back to square one.'"Foxworthy says it takes about a year of working out material in small rooms (around 30 people) to refill that pantry for an hour-long special. For that reason, he says that while he still loves stand-up comedy, this special is his last − but he has no immediate plans to give up on stand-up."I've done game shows, I've done sitcoms, I've done movies, I've done voiceovers, I've written books, but out of all those things, if you held a gun to my head and said, 'You can't do but one,' it would be stand-up," Foxworthy says.Jeff Foxworthy feels good about the state of comedy for this reasonThere are no politics discussed in Foxworthy's latest special. The comedian believes that Americans, regardless of political beliefs, can "agree on 85% of the same things." He rattles off notions of feeding your family, taking care of your parents and children, and seeking entertainment."We went through a period of where we couldn't celebrate that 85%," he says, citing specifically the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. "We had to yell at each other about the 15%."Foxworthy believes the job of comedy is "to hold up a mirror to the things we do as human beings" and ask questions, not to get people to agree on an idea."I had comic friends that were like, 'I think I'm just gonna stop. It's not fun anymore,'" he continues. "I fought through it, and I'm glad I did because now people have seemed to have lightened up a little bit, but the truth is we're all idiots. Nobody has life figured out."
