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"I'm a Comic With a Southern Accent"
Foxworthy, a Georgia native, rankles when referred to as a Southern humorist. He's sold 12 million albums and 10 million DVDs worldwide, with a large concentration of sales in Los Angeles. "I'm a comic with a Southern accent," he says. "Nobody calls Jerry Seinfeld a Northern comic." But he readily admits he's a redneck -- in his words, someone with "a glorious lack of sophistication."Bill Engvall, his co-star on the WB's Blue Collar TV, agrees. "Jeff drives a truck, so I would call him a redneck," Engvall says, "but he's a redneck who hit the lottery."
Foxworthy says that he started out life "real low middle class," though his father worked at IBM. The eldest of three, Jeff moved from Decatur, Georgia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, to Greenville, South Carolina, as a child. His parents divorced when he was nine, and when his mother relocated the family back to Georgia, Foxworthy discovered that his jokester personality helped ease the transition. On a seventh-grade field trip to Washington, he listened as a chaperon told the group never to throw anything out their hotel window, then led the class in staging what amounted to a ticker-tape parade of confetti.
"He was the life of the party as far back as I can remember," explains his brother, Jay. A great mimic, Jeff regularly launched into imitations of whichever adult had just left the room. "He would do their voice," Jay recalls, "and we'd all be cracking up until Dad would stick his head in, and we'd be in trouble for makin' fun of Grandma."
Jeff spent weekdays with his church-minded mother and weekends with a hard-partying father who "drank, smoked, cussed" and married six times. The result: "I can fit in anywhere -- sit on the back of a pickup at a dove shoot or go to the White House and know how to act."
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