Decade-Old Jeff Foxworthy Skit Is Painfully Relevant, and Getting More Views Than Ever
If there was any show 5-year-old me loved more than anything else, it was “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
What’s not to love about it? After all, it had the General Lee being chased by the Boss Hogg and Roscoe in that huge white Cadillac week after week around a county that seemed to have an awful lot of out-of-service bridges that Bo and Luke needed to jump over. (This was, of course, back when the Democrats controlled most of Dixie, which probably explains why Hazzard County’s infrastructure had gone to pot.)
It had flaming arrows. It had freeze frames where the grizzled pipes of Waylon Jennings would intone something like “Now can you believe the Duke Boys have gotten themselves into a pickle like this…” every time.
Say what you will about “Mad Men”, but did it destroy 220 Dodge Challengers during its broadcast run? That’s what I thought.
Even as an inveterate Yankee from a liberal part of the country, I never dreamed anyone would get themselves into such a snit over a car with a Confederate flag on the top of the car. Oh, I was so naive back then.
“Redneck” comedian Jeff Foxworthy saw it coming, however — and on the “Blue Collar Comedy Hour” in 2006, Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and friends used a spoof on “The Dukes of Hazzard” movie to predict just how dystopian the future of the Duke boys would be. It’s painfully relevant today:
Among the perfidies visited upon the venerable series:
- The stars and bars flag on the General Lee was replaced with a rainbow/unicorn flag (“All the different colors of the rainbow represent all the different people we share our world with!”),
- Uncle Jesse is holding a “Dare to be Different” vegetarian chili cook-off
- An electric General Lee that could be passed by a morbidly obese runner
- A warning to “Luke” that a joke about laxatives might offend “rectally-challenged” viewers
- An African-American Boss Hogg
- Boss Hogg and Uncle Jesse (who is Jewish) hugging it out at the end of the episode
As it turns out, the movie was particularly bad, but not for the reasons speculated upon by Messrs. Foxworthy and Cable Guy. A lot probably had to do with the casting of “Jacka**” “star” Johnny Knoxville, “American Pie” has-been Sean William Scott, and professional dimwit Jessica Simpson.
Of her role, Roger Ebert remarked that:
“Simpson is so remarkably uninformed that she should sue the public schools of Abilene, Texas, or maybe they should sue her. On the day he won his seventh Tour de France, not many people could say, as she did, that they had no idea who Lance Armstrong was … Simpson plays Daisy Duke, whose short shorts became so famous on TV that they were known as ‘Daisy Dukes.’ She models them to a certain effect in a few brief scenes, but is missing from most of the movie. Maybe she isn’t even smart enough to wear shorts.”
Even then, she’s still probably smart enough to write for BuzzFeed, which routinely engages in the kind of aggressively vacant celluloid revisionism that Foxworthy and Co. were presaging.
In an article published last August called “The ‘Asian Character Hair Streak’ Is Real And A Huge Problem,” BuzzFeed’s Rachael Krishna argued that giving Asian characters a streak of colored hair was a racist attempt to impart a personality trait since it showed that Asians couldn’t be rebellious without hair coloring. Really.
No, it may not have been ridiculous as what Foxworthy was proposing. Give Hollywood and the left some time, though. I’m sure they’ll come up with something.
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