You Might Be

Everything I Learned About Frog Behinds I Learned from a Bootleg Tape

People have been sending me frog pictures recently. Well, not just me. They send them to the show, post them on our Facebook group, and tag us in posts containing frogs on Instagram. We’ve seen cartoon frogs, real frogs, and frogs with macromutations resulting in eyeballs in their mouths. Most recently, we got a picture of a nude frog, though aren’t they all? This one was standing on its hind legs, its little froggy bottom on full display.

These photos started pouring in after we did an episode on The Loveland Frog Man. After the episode aired, two things happened. First, we were informed that we incorrectly pronounced the town’s name, saying “LOVE-land” throughout the episode. Native Lovelanders apparently say “luv-l’nd.” I issued an official statement on the next episode explaining that I say LOVE-Land because (1) I’m from Texas and that’s just how I talk, and (2) saying “luv-l’nd” before “Frog Man” misses the opportunity for a really great rhyme, and that is marketing 101.

Second, we started getting these frog pics, including the one of the little nudie frog booty. Confused comments on the tushy photo indicated to me that most folks were unaware that frogs had butts. I’m sure, of course, they knew that frogs had something back there. After all, every living creature has a built-in exit route. But people seemed amused and surprised at his little cheeks all popped out at the top of his skinny legs beneath his bulbous figure.

I, on the other hand, was not surprised at all. I learned about frog butts as a child. It happened when I stumbled onto a bootleg audio cassette that belonged to my Mam-maw, my grandmother on my mom’s side. My dad’s mom, Granny, sent religious literature and admonished us for never going to church. Mam-maw slipped me swigs of her piña coladas and gave me fun stuff like this stand-up comedy cassette.

I have no clue where she got the tape. The handwriting on the label was decidedly mannish and didn’t match the curly cues of her cursive style. A widow of nearly 20 years at the time and never having dated or remarried after my grandfather’s death, it likely came from a handyman or neighbor or person she met at the grocery store.

Mam-maw never met a stranger. She made every person she met feel heard and loved immediately. This created a swath of people who considered her to be their grandma, too, even though biologically she was nothing of the sort. My selfish little heart thought love was a limited quantity item, and so I believed if she had these hangers-on, she would necessarily have to love me less. This meant I had to hate them. Mam-maw taught me the opposite was true. She had an ever-expanding heart, and no new arrivals were going to bump me out. Her capacity to love went hand-in-hand with her generosity. She was generous with everything — her affection, her attention, her ear, her limited funds, and just about any item in her house.

“It’s only stuff,” she once said to quell my protests as she was forking over her wedding band to a ne’er-do-well cousin who once came knocking.

Given her generosity, it is no surprise I ended up with her bootleg comedy tape. I confess, I can’t remember much about how I got it. Maybe I asked for it, thinking it was a music cassette like my beloved Simpsons Sing the Blues album. What I do remember is taking it home and putting it in the enormous silver stereo that sat on a wooden entertainment center in our living room. I put my head next to the speaker and pressed play.

The tape began with an announcer’s voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeff Foxworthy.”

A crowd screamed and a twanged voice thanked them very much. The tape was Jeff Foxworthy’s 1993 album You Might Be A Redneck If… recorded live at the Majestic Theater in Dallas. Foxworthy, then in his 30s, waxed poetic about how good it was to be in Texas and how crazy Southerners talked. He hails from Georgia, but his opening bit about words like yunto, as in “We goin’ tomorrow. Yunto?” and jeetyet as in, “You hungry? Jeetyet?” absolutely killed with the Dallas crowd. It was jokes about my people told in front of a crowd of my people.

He then launched into his signature “You might be a redneck” bit before he covered the difference in single life and married life, and the roles of men and women in relationships and society. You know, all the things a girl in grade school really related to.

I wasn’t a total comedy beginner. I was raised on The Dick Van Dyke Show and Seinfeld. I understood that comedy writing was a job, a real career people really did. I understood that stand-up comedy existed. I just thought it existed only in the state of New York and only in 2-to-5-minute increments before a sitcom began. Listening to Jeff Foxworthy’s voice for the duration of a full cassette tape — both sides! — recorded in my hometown, talking like my family and my neighbors, describing what our life was like, gave me hope.

It wasn’t all about my family. He also talked about fishing and belt buckles and boots, things that were a little more country than we were. In so doing, he let me feel a comfortable distance from the butts of his jokes. Still, he wasn’t necessarily mocking any of his subjects. His bits were an exaggerated celebration, and based on the audience’s cheers, a relatable and enjoyable celebration at that.

It wasn’t unusual for me to sit and listen to a voice coming through the stereo speaker. Throughout my childhood, we spent every school day morning listening to Kidd Kraddick in the Morning, a local drive-time DJ who eventually became nationally syndicated. From Kidd, Kellie, and Big Al, I learned you can be funny with your friends behind a microphone as your job. That part I understood.

The only thing missing from the radio show was an audience. My family and I may have been laughing while eating Eggos in the comfort of our living room or in our mini-van in the drop-off line at school, but the DJs never heard us. Listening to the Foxworthy tape, my tiny ear pressed against the black fabric of the speakers, I heard the immediate whoops and hollers resulting from Foxworthy’s jokes. I heard the subtle laughs that bubbled up after a particularly clever line. I heard crowdwork.

I had no idea what it looked like inside the Majestic Theater the night he performed this set. Like the radio shows, it was just a voice emanating from a void, except with an audience behind him. I think I just imagined him performing in a black void of nothingness, unable to conceptualize what a full-blown theatrical stand-up show should look like. I kept that mental picture of him in the void inside my head for years, until I finally caught one of his specials on TV.

Soon, I sought out other stand-up shows. That’s when I first watched Lewis Black and Dave Chappelle and Adam Ferrara. It’s why I later bought and memorized Shut Up, You Fucking Baby, David Cross’s 2001 album, and why I, along with almost everyone else I knew from high school, bought Dane Cook’s 2005 album Retaliation.

I studied the differences in their voices. The rhythm of their jokes. I learned timing and setups, though I didn’t know I was learning. I was enamored with the act of standing up with a microphone and making audiences laugh, but none of them made me feel like I could do something similar as much as Jeff Foxworthy did.

To this day, my family — namely my mom — quotes several of his jokes, including the one about frog butts. The same joke that popped into my head when I saw those little green cheeks and made me turn his comedy on. The bit actually appears on 1998’s Totally Committed, a spin-off of sorts from Foxworthy’s previous redneck-heavy material. The redneck talk is still there. It’s just phrased in a different way.

Listening back now, the material in both specials holds up. More esoteric minds than mine may consider it a bit hack, but I’d challenge them to come up with a more memorable metaphor for what childbirth looks like than “a wet Saint Bernard trying to come in through the cat door.”

I’ll concede the path of marriage jokes and “men versus women” is well trodden. It’s also still true, and relatable as hell. Though they seem like we’ve always known the phrase, when he first debuted “You might be a redneck, it was revolutionary. He built an entire career, an empire even, on these observations. They resonated so much because they were largely true. Believe me, I know. I’ve lived some of them. He also provided the shoulders on which my current favorite comic, Nate Bargatze, stands. A much more evolved form of the schtick for sure, Bargatze makes me actually cry-laugh with his specials no matter how many times I’ve watched them. But he is undoubtedly inspired by Foxworthy. I’m sure others are, too.

Whatever anyone feels about Jeff Foxworthy, I can say this much: he made me laugh back then and managed to do it again today when I revisit his material. Today’s laugh came out a little different. It wasn’t based in the wonderment I held for him back when I was a kid. It was the type of laugh rooted in nostalgic recognition. Like jokes you heard from your schoolteacher. So clever and exciting at first, then by the tenth or twentieth time they’re delivered, you see them coming and slide into them like slippers.

Listening back now, I almost have the Redneck album memorized. I can finish the lines, not because the jokes are predictable, but because I was so changed by them. Could a setup like “If you’ve ever had to haul a can of paint to the top of a water tower to defend your sister’s honor…” ever be so easily forgotten?

For me, these jokes were transformative. I will always hold a spot in my comedy heart for them. Jeff Foxworthy was one of my earliest teachers, delivering lectures through those wood paneled speakers in my parents’ living room from each side of that tape. Lifelong lessons that made me who I am — like how to speak in your own voice, how to pull comedy stories from your own life, and just exactly what a frog’s butt looks like.

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