The MeatEater PodcastEp. 527: Finding the Funny in Stuff with Jeff Foxworthy
Steven Rinella talks with comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
Topics discussed: Foxworthy’s best work according to Steve, “The Incomplete Deer Hunter”; moo shu matzo balls; deer shot during Mardi Gras; a correction on Steve’s use of the word “crescendo”; eclipsing the apex of one’s splendor; when Foxworthy met Bruce Springstein; when the Beverly Hills Dodge dealership won’t actually sell you a truck; when deer needed to be brought into Georgia; the huge market for blue collar and redneck comedy; meeting your career and your wife five minutes apart; mountain lion sightings; how Jeff has sold more comedy records than anyone who’s ever lived; becoming a bowhunter; managing the farm for wildlife; arrowhead hunting meth heads; when Jeff found a 7,000-year-old pipe; when you’re old enough to derive happiness out of being involved in another person’s hunt; still not knowing exactly what folks are going to laugh at; and more.
Outro song: "Raccoon Pecker" by Matt Baric
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This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't predict anything. The meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. Hey, everybody, listen up. I got I got mega huge news. Me Eater Live is heading back out on the road. That's right, Join me and the crew talking Clay newcom cal Yannie, Spencer's gonna be there, Phil, Phil the engineer is gonna be there. Meet it or Live headed back out now. When you get every ticket, Okay, every ticket you buy, you get a signed copy of our new me Eater Outdoor Cookbook. This tour is celebrating the release of the book. Buy a ticket, get a signed copy Memeter Outdoor Cookbook. Wild Game recipes for the grill smoker, campstoven campfire, which I'll point out is a thirty eight dollars value. Here's where we're gonna go. April twenty third, the Masa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona, April twenty four, The Balboa Theater in San Diego April twenty five, The Grove in Anaheim, California, April twenty seven, The Crest Theater and Sacramento April twenty nine, The Union in Salt Lake City April thirty, The Egyptian in Boise May one, The Wilma Theater in Missoula, May two, The Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane, Washington. May four, Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and May five, the last day of the tour, Pantagious Theater in Tacoma, Washington. For ticket some more information, visit the events page at themeeater dot com. We're not coming to your neck of the woods, and you still want to get your hands on a signed copy of our new Me Eater Outdoor Cookbook, go to Signed Outdoor Cookbook dot com or check out Barnes and Noble Online. Hope to see you at the showy everybody, joined today by Jeff Foxworthy, who I've wanted to have you on for forever. We talked about it years ago, but you don't I had to come to you. Look.
I have spent my entire life on the road. It's like it was kind of a race between you and Rogan. No, you won't even travel to go on Joe, Oh, I won't travel. Joe's like, come, I really want to talk to you, Come do the show. I want to talk about hunting, and I'm like, dude, I don't want to fly to Austin.
All the way over to off. Well, but.
I've spent four decades on airplanes and hotel rooms.
I got you. Yeah, comedy, you can't finish farm No, I didn't. I want to finish my intro. Then I want to get into what you were talking about. I hope it's good. Well, here here's the problem. Problem is Krinn wrote the intro okay, but on the subject to Krinn, our producer Krinn, as everyone knows is Chinese and Jewish, and Jeff's already got half act. That's just such a weird combination. I'm not gonna tell anybody the jokes. I don't want to ruin him. He's got half act. What was the last one?
The only place that you can go to somebody's house and eat Moushu matzabo.
There you see, You see where it's going. Comedian actor, author, television hosts and writer. The reason I was criticizing Kren's introduction, she said last night, do you think we should have an introduction for Jeff? And yeah, I make one, but she only put she put perhaps your greatest work last, and you probably don't realize it was your greatest work, which is The Incomplete Deer Hunter. Oh my god. So i'd like to say. Jeff Foxworthy is the creative of The Incomplete Deer Hunter and a comedian, actor, author, television hosting writer. He's been nominated for a Grammy. Has a book of poems for kids New York Times bestseller. Is a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Larry the Cable Guy, who I had no idea his name Wasn't Larry, did you not?
No, you need to get out more. You've spent way too much time in the woods.
You were talking today about how he's played golf for thirty years and never got one struck better never, it's not even humanly possible. Comedy specialist on Netflix, the good old days. And then of course what she has at the end, The Incomplete Deer Hunter. And I want to add just another thing of your many funny jokes. One of my favorites is in one of your records. I can't remember which one. You're talking about the impulse too. I thought of this being in here, people's impulse to dress taxider me up. Yeah, well that's what you don't do. And and you were commenting that sometimes people put so much stuff on their deer mounths that it looks like they got killed at Marty Groun. Yeah, oh yeah.
They have like beads around them and sunglasses and you know, Christmas time you put a little Santa hat on them.
But they yell a lot of them.
They stick a cigarette in their mouth and beads on them, and dude, I laughed a.
Lot of shot them at Marty. Yeah. Uh man, let me do here. Here's the thing I don't know, Like, I got one thing I want to talk about, all right, because we do listener feedback, okay, which I'm cutting it all all right, So I want to get to your story that you're just talking about about how musicians got it made and comedians don't. Yeah, but I want to tell you one thing because you might have made this mistake. This is just one I hate to exclude the audience. I want to do one listener feedback, and we like to focus on criticisms. Okay, excuse my pedantry. This is from a guy named Alex. What's a pedantry? Uh like teachy? Okay, preachy? Right, pedantry. Anytime someone starts out a letter with excuse my pedantry, you know you're in trouble. Excuse my pedantry. But I have noticed Steve committing a pet peeve of mine that seems common to most writer types, and it pains me not to point it out. He has on multiple occasions, most recently, in episode five fourteen, used the phrase reached a crescendo to describe an apex or climax. You follow the.
Look, I'm so glad the criticism is against you. I just breathed a sigh of relief. So go so be like around midnight. Yeah, it reached a crescendo of noise.
Yeah, what should it be? Well, However, a crescendo is a rising action. It means to increase volume. Crescendo from piano quiet to forte loud. It's a musical term. Sure, in this example, the forte volume would be the peak of intensity. It's not the crescendo. He's right, Yeah, the inverse of crescendo would be to d crescendo. My realm of expertise is only musical, but my understanding is that the same holds true of the word and non musically related Italian as well. Italian. I appreciate that.
Yeah, well, that's what I say about me aging is I have eclipsed the apex of my splendor God, which means.
You know that you're on the now. I want to get I want to get back to think you were talking about a minute ago and saying that you were telling me before alterned the machine on. The musicians got it made because the musician can have four hits, yeah, and then spend the rest of his life playing those four songs, and people are gonna come out.
Yeah, you'd be ninety years old. They're gonna come to hear those four songs. They might like your other stuff, but they're there for songs.
Yeah.
A comedian, it's the opposite is you know, back in the day, you did a record or you did a CD and you record a special and people go, oh, that was funny. What have you got that's new? Yeah, so is a comic. It would be like a musician going I'm never playing the hits again. I'm going to go write a new album, and once I release that album, I'll never play that again. And that's what a comic does, which is one of the most agonized. After forty one years of doing stand up. It's like I did that last special and I'm like, okay, yeah, starting over from camprest. Now I'm back to the club with thirty people in and no cards in my hand, going is this funny?
Is this funny? Is this funny? And that's how a comic works. The writer David Remnick once observed he was profiling Bruce Springsteen, but he observed that he was talking about the Rolling Stones. How a band can eventually become its own cover band. Yeah, you know, but you're right. Your comic can't do that now Springsteen. He can't be like I just want to wait till he does the one bit and then we'll go home. Yeah.
No, they don't want to get they've heard that now. But I got to meet Bruce one time, and my question for him was, I said, how is a twenty year old could you write lyrics like young girls sitting on the hood of a dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain. I said, nobody twenty should be able to write that, and he goes, you know, I just.
Wanted to be writing stuff. I wasn't going to be embarrassed singing thirty years later. I'm like mission a conference. That's a good that's a good approach.
Uh.
Tell everywhere we're at right now, we're at my farm about an hour south of Atlanta. Uh, this is my if I'm not working, this is my sanctuary, this is this is my happy place. I always say when I go through the gate, I'm no longer Jeff Foxworthy. I'm just Jeff cheapest labor on the farm. I will work all day long with a bag of jerky in three waters and get on a tractor and happy as a clown.
You were telling me earlier how people are surprised. Some people were surprised that that you wanted land and not like Jerry Seinfeld wanted cars. Well, you observe the attractor costs more than a lot of his cars. Yeah.
Well, like when when I did my sitcom, it was we film right next to Seinfeld, and so Jerry and I had parking places next to each other. He had like an aircraft hanger full of Porsches, so every day he'd come in with a different Porsche. I had a pickup truck. I literally went to Beverly Hills Dodge and I said, I want one of the new Ram trucks. And the guy goes to drive. He goes to, we don't sell those here. I had to go out somewhere from so I would pull into it with my pickup truck in the spot, and Jerry would wheel in with his porch and get out and go, good morning, loser, you know, the dude in the pickup truck. But yeah, I didn't. I mean, that wasn't my thing. I didn't care about car. I want a car, guy. I wanted a farm. I wanted to land, and so that's where my car money. But I did tell Jerry, I said, you really need to come film an episode of comedians drinking coffee and tractors, because some of my tractors cost more than your porsches.
Yeah, have you comedians getting beer and tracks? Right?
I think he would love a tractor or a bulldozer and just fill the joy of pushing a tree over or something.
You know, how did uh you have a property because you like the hunt? Yeah, it's beautifully managed. You managed as a wildlife. It's like you manage for wildlife, deer in particular, but you managed for wildlife when you were growing up. What was your what was your understanding of deer hunting spots? Like what kind of ground did you guys hunt as a kid.
Well, it's funny like growing up in Georgia, we didn't have deer when I was a kid. We but you squirrel hunted, You quail hunted, your rabbit hunted, and it was usually on some relatives farm. Everybody had small farms back then, so and my dad didn't have a bird dog, so he would buy me briar bridges and then go, hey, get down there and walk through there, and I was the dog.
I flushed. What'd your dad do for a living?
My dad grew up on a farm, but he worked at IBM. He did, yeah, he had he was a smart dude. But we'd go back to these little farms and that's how I learned to hunt. Was like I remember being four or five years old and going squirrel hunt and learn it. And you got to sit still, you can't talk, you can't move, and then it was quail hunting. Then it was dove hunting, and then it became deer hunting. I hunted by the time I was a teenager in Georgia. I hunted two years before I saw a deer. Now that was Jeddicart deer two years before he saw a deer. Yeah, getting up every weekend, going through the motions, getting up Saturday morning, Saturday evening, Sunday morning, never saw a deer. And it took me, I think, three years, and I finally shot a little five point buck, which I thought.
That's the one he showed me. Well, no, that was the second one.
That was the eight point buck, which had a basket wrack like this that I literally I think I didn't clean it for three days. I kept driving it through town because I was pretty sure it was the state record, and I wanted everybody to say I saw it. I saw it on the tail gate of his truck.
You know.
But you only know what you know. I knew nothing about deer hunting. I would I would go like behind grocery stores and get palettes, and go to construction sites and get two by fours and I would make my own stands. I'd get like railroad spikes and go up a tree with two by fours and put a palette up there, and never thought about the wind, never thought about is there a food source or a bedding probably, never thought about the safety was no safety, harness, no, but never thought about any of that stuff, and climb up and you know, after three years one of the steps would rote and you'd drop. I mean, it's a wonder we're still here. But I knew I loved it. I knew I loved being out in the woods by myself, which is kind of crazy because like on my dad's farm, me and two friends would leave in the morning with a twenty two and a twelve game shotgun and take off through the woods. We had no cel phone, nobody knew.
Where we were. We didn't know where we were were.
You know, we just go explore the woods and ended up on a road and walked back home. And it was just a totally different time.
I've told you a couple of times today that I had no idea that here in Georgia, you guys, deer numbers were so bad that they actually brought in deer they had to restop. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of areas where it got bad. But I just was not aware that they had to do like that, they had to do a white tailed deer reintroduction in Georgia.
Yeah, yeah, and did it during the fifties. It's like I told you as a kid, Yeah, never saw a deer. And we're lucky here at the farm because most of the deer they brought into Georgia they brought from Texas. In our particular area, they came down from Wisconsin, so our deer were kind of bigger horned and bigger bodied, and it's just a real good portion of the state.
To hont end. When you were little, what kind of you've done a lot of comedy about hunting and sort of like parodies on hunting. When you were little, you were you aware of any kind of like hunting videos and stuff like were you going out and buying VHS tapes the instructional hunting content?
Dude, I had no idea. So when I was a kid, I would save my allowance and I would buy comedy records Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Jerry Klower, you know, and I'd memorize them and I'd go to school and I could do the whole album, and so, you know, I was the funny kid. But I never, you know, hunting was hunting. And I remember the first time I was probably thirty, that I saw a real tree hunting video, a deer hunting video, and I'm like, oh my gosh, people other people can experience deer hunting. Of course, it was way bigger deer than I ever had seen, you know, But but it kind of led to in you mentioned this in the intro part of hunting. There's that solitary part that's really good, but there's also that communal part that you get in a deer camp, not when you're out actually hunting, but in the camp where it's a very social thing and there's a lot of laughter going on. And so I thought, well, if guys are watching videos of hunts, why wouldn't they watch funny videos too, And so I came up with the Incomplete Deer Hunter. Somebody asked me a while back, they said, who did you write those? I went, right, yeah, No, we were in the woods with deer suits. We had made going what if we do this, this and this? But I thought and it was it was a crazy idea. We sold millions of those.
But it's like, maybe you didn't write them, but there's a lot of you know, this is the thing I want to ask about. Anyways, this is the there's like laughing at your culture from the inside and laughing from the outside. And this is something you know intimately. Well, like, yeah, your whole expertise is laughing from the inside.
Well, I'll give you a great example. Like, so you grew up in Michigan, right, And so I was the kid when I started comedy. I wore jeans, I wore boots, I drove a truck, and I was I was just the outdoor kid. But I'm the comedian now in the clubs and I'm up in Michigan and it was like November and I'm like, man, I ought to be sitting in a tree in the morning. You know, it's the middle of the road. I need to be in a tree. And they were kidding me. I was playing right outside Detroit, little town called Lavonia.
And.
We were sitting around and they were going fox for of you nothing but an old redneck from Georgia. Well, the club that we were playing in was attached to a bowling alley that had parking. And I said, if you don't think you have read Nicks in Michigan. Go look out the window. People are valet parking at the Bowling Alley. And I went back to the hotel that night, and I didn't think it was going to be a hook. I didn't think it was going to be a book or t shirts. I just thought, maybe this is funny material. And I wrote ten ways how to tell how you might be a Redneck? And I went back the next night and just try to stand up. And not only were people laughing, they were pointing at each other. Well, every one of them was things my family had done. You know, if your front porch collapses and kills more than three dogs, that was my uncle Bob's house. When you pulled up in the driveway, the whole bottom of the house just erupted with dogs. If you have a complete set of salad bowls and they all say cool whip off the side, that's my sister. It's nothing but buttertubs, cool whip dubs, and jelly glasses. So I wasn't laughing at somebody, I'm laughing with, you know, And that's kind of always spend my comedy. My My template is is I feel like if if I think something or my wife says something, or my family does something. I'm gonna trust other people are thinking you're saying and doing the same thing.
That that that that the one it works is because there's an expertise of the subject matter, you know. And I'm like laugh about your incomplete deer hunter thing is when you guys have the deer suits on and the deer kind of like coaching all the other deer about coach fucking coaching. Yeah, like this year's game plan, and there's like very sort of like specific references the coach is telling the other deer. He's like when all you does and little bucks come out in the field, don't look back when I come out in the field.
Yeah, just tell them I'm coming.
Yeah, but that was all experienced. Oh yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like you're like you're watching it, like, no, these dudes actually hunt, because no one would ever, like ever, if I the outsider was goofing on redneggs, a goofing on deer hunters, they would never know that little bit of body language. Yeah, where a hunter's like there's something in the wood still because those deer keep looking back in there.
And that's what I tell young comics, I said, talk about what you know about uh huh uh. It's like when I wrote ten redneck jokes, I thought, well, if I write ten, kind of write fifty. And then we wrote fifty, I might kind of write a hundred. And I got like three hundred of them. I sent them to fourteen different publishers and got rejected, Well you did, yeah, rejected by the first fourteen. And I sent it to the fifteen and he called me and he said, come in, let's talk. And he said, he said, I think this is funny. He said, how does fifteen hundred dollars set Steve? I thought he was asking me for fifteen hundred bucks, and so I'm like, uh, because I didn't have fifteen hundred bucks. And he goes, no, no, no, we'll pay you. I'm like, hell, yeah, let's do it, you know. And I remember asking him, I said, how many of these you think we'll sell? How many books? And he said, oh, I bet we sell five thousand of them. I think we sold four million of them. You know, because who was the publisher Longstreet Press, but small publisher in Atlanta. But but from doing comedy, I'd been to all fifty states. I didn't hang in LA in New York. I was going everywhere in between, and I knew LA and New York were the media centers, but I also came to know the people living in the country, and from what I observed, I'm like, you know, thirty minutes outside of any major city, we're all the same, and we may have a little different accent, but we're all hunting, and we're all fishing, and we're all growing gardens, and we're all you know, got that My definition of redneck is glorious absence of sophistication.
You know, That's all it is.
And I knew there was a market there, which is why we did the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. When they did the Kings of Comedy, Atlanta was one of the first stops, and in the paper, in an article about it, it said that it was a show for the urban hip audience. And I thought, I've been to every stake. There's a lot of people that aren't irving, and they're not hip. And I called building Ball and I said, we need to do a show for everybody that this doesn't apply to. And he laughed and said, what would you call it? And I'm like, hell, I don't know, call it the blue collar, blue Collar Comedy Tour, and we were going to do it for three weeks, and we did it the first one for three years.
I mean, it was just it just hit an irve. Have you always planned? Have you always when you're touring and doing all those shows and all that, were you always trying to schedule around being able to hunt and fish and stuff? Well? Did you sometimes just have to eat it and be like, I'm not going to do anything outdoors because I'm going to like, while the fire's burning hot, I'm just going to go do my business.
Well, back in the club day, because most clubs were like Tuesday through Sunday, I had eight years in a row. I did five hundred shows a year at least. And you're going, whether there's only three hundred and sixty five nuts, but you're doing two shows on Friday night, three shows on Saturday night. If you were in a you might be bouncing from club to club, and I would just keep note because I wanted I wanted to be on Johnny Carson, and I thought, the only way I'm going to do this is kind of the Malcolm Gladwell theory. I've got to do it ten thousand times to become an expert at it. And my goal was everybody said, it takes you ten years to be a good enough comedian to be on Carson, and I thought, I'll do it in half. I'm going to work so hard night. Yeah, and it actually took me five years and two months, but I did it, And so then I didn't I didn't do anything but do comedy. But then once I started moving from cl to like theaters and things like that.
When you say a club, that's one hundred people, two hundred people, hundred people, two hundred people, and when you say a theater, it's one thousand and three thousand, Yeah.
Up to four or five thousand. But the great thing about theaters and that kind of happened because of the albums. People became aware of you, and then they would they would come. Well, theaters were more Friday and Saturday, which was great because it was about the time I had kids, so I could be home during the week and I was just going on the weekend doing shows. Then I could start to get back into hunting and fishing. Fact, when I did are You Smarter than the fifth Grader? I had it in my contract that I could film eleven months of the year, but I couldn't film the month of November. And I had an LA attorney come up to me and say why, I don't understand. Why can't you film in November? And I said because it's the rut? And he was like, the what the what? I'm like, dude, it's the rut.
I'm not hunting.
I mean, I'm not filming during the rut. I'm going to be home. And so I may be the only idiot in LA that had that in there?
Has that in there? Do you ever try to go hit? Do you ever try to go somewhere and to be trying to get out in the morning with people you know and hit little things like hit the morning Turkey Hunt and then make it too ye show.
It was just always hard because you couldn't travel with guns and you know, and like back in the day, you do a show on Friday night, Well you walk off stage, say you were in Michigan. Where you're the next night you may be in Kansas City. So you're up at five am to catch the first flight to fly to Kansas City, which you get there at ten or eleven.
Well, your day's kind of shot. So it was just hard. I know that feeling. You know how you would do five hundred shows a year, yeah, do you maybe six to eight? Yeah, And so I have a level of expertise here, bute, And I know that even then, you always like, as you're planning it, you're thinking about, man, I'm gonna hunt turkeys and every one of the locations.
Yeah, and you just never have the time to do it. And yours were different. Like when I watch your shows, Like for me, I told my wife, I said, you love to travel because when you get somewhere, you open your suitcase and you open it for a week. I said, I'm opening my suitcase every day and packing it back up because you're in a different city every night. And but like with your shows, when you're going to these remote places, Hell, you're going to sheep Hunch, You're going two weeks.
Oh that kind of show. Yeah, I was referring to doing like doing live shows, which are a very small handful of Oh no, it's uh, your trips were long, drong trips. Yeah, you really get like a doing that kind of doing that kind of lifestyle, especially when were making a lot of shows. Man, you get like a really deep immersion into a lot of different spots, which is just completely like not at all similar to what you're talking about with like the turn and burn and cans of Yeah, did you did you start to formulate an idea of at what point in your life did you start thinking that at some point I'm going to slow down and enjoy myself more and what will that look like? Like? When did you indulge yourself with that, you know, with that vision? Because I look now, I feel like you got I think when I'm here like mens Guy's got it meet, I know.
But I'm like last weekend in the woods, and last weekend I was in Michigan on Friday night, Minnesota on Saturday night. So I still I still enjoy what I do, but I've slowed down. I mean I probably do forty or fifty concerts a year now as opposed to hundreds because I want to enjoy my grandkids. Yeah, you know, yesterday I'm riding around on tractors and skit steers with my two and a half year old grandson. That's that's my joy in life. That's why I always said I didn't want to live to work and wanted to work to live Unfortunately, I was born with a work with a work ethic.
You know. I uh, I don't want to sit around. You know.
My mom's like, you need to slow down. I said, I just wasn't born with that brain. I can't just sit on the couch. I want to go do something. I want to go see something, learn something.
Did your uh did your folks think you were crazy for what you wanted to do? Yeah, well they did. They try to discourage you, like, he'll never do that. You know, well, I blew up.
My folks divorced early, so my dad had a really good job working at IBM. But my granddad was a fireman.
When you say early, how old are you like eight or nine? H oh, well did you understand what was going on? Well? Back I was the only kid I knew that had divorced parents. It was.
You know that it sucked because you know, I wanted my dad there. But I love my grandparents and my granddad, bless his heart, was a fireman. So he worked one day and had too often he was fishing the two he was off and he would take me got you know, great granddad, which was one of my goals in life. I'm like, I want to be a really good granddad. But everybody I knew they were blue collar, they worked for a living. So even though I was attracted to comedy, it never occurred to me that that was a possibility. Yeah, you probably hadn't met a comic. No, they were just on TV. But I was the funny guy. I actually I worked in a grocery store, and I worked at a hotel, and then I got a job I think my dad, because I flunked out of college after three years. I think my dad thought I was going to end up being a near do well, so I think he got one of his friends to call and give me a job at IBM entry level. I was working dispatch, and then later on I was I carried a toolbag and fixed machines. But I was the funny guy work. I was the guy that was in the break room doing impersonations of the boss, and then you would turn around, the boss would be in the doorway.
I was that guy.
So I wasn't on the crescendo to be to the top. And a bunch of guys I worked with entered me in a comedy competition, not an amateur night, a competition for working comedians called the Great Southeastern laugh Off. They entered me in and I'm like, oh crap, I got to write material. So I wrote five minutes about my family. I went down. I won the contest. The first time was the material. It was why I lived in Sarasota, Florida, and I talked about it being it was God's waiting room because everybody there was like ninety years old. Then I did a bit about dads when everybody else cuts their toenails. They put him in the trash dad's sleeve. Theres in the ashtray in the den for the whole family to come observe and admire. And the crazy thing is my wife used to act, and she had just done a TV show with a comedian and she was there that night rooting for him in the competition. So I met my career and I met my wife five minutes apart.
He stole his fan. Yeah, were they romantically involved now? Now?
In fact, he's He and his wife are two of our best friends to this day. But what's the odds of finding your career and your wife five minutes apart, same night? I guess low, Yeah, low, And but I knew, Oh, I take that back.
A little bit because when I sold my first book, I went I had never been to New York. Sold my first book, went to have a meeting. I sold to Miermax prior to those fellas Bob and Harvey Einstein, I have sold their company. Flew to New York to meet the people that bought my book, and in that meeting met my wife. Did you not from New York? Did you know when you met her? Did you? Did you?
Because I know so. I met my wife on a Tuesday night. We went out on a Saturday, and an hour into the date, I went, oh, crap, I'm gonna marry this girl.
Oh really? An hour into the first.
Date and she was the only one that was saying to me, you could do this. She said to me, she said, you are so creative. If you sit in a cubicle the rest of your life, you're going to have a miserable life. You're going to explode. You need to do something creative. Is your wife rednick?
No, she's from New Orleans. Does that make you out a redneck? I understand.
No, They've got a lot of them down there, But like, instead of.
Because in my mind, I think I don't think of that as incompatiby.
No, they're very compatible because she has family in other parts of the Louisiana that will eat things the FBI can't identify. I mean, it's just but I think she really thought she was going to pull me up to her level and instead I.
Just drown drug her down to the middle.
But but she it was like the first person that got me, you know what I mean, She's just like And so I thought how I could do this? And so I quit my job and I tell my kids, I'm like that. At that point, well I went. I did Amateur Night for like six months and little gigs around town, but I knew by then I loved it.
And what was the first money you were making at it? I mean, not like, I mean, what was the first like helpful, usable amount of money.
So December the fourth, nineteen eighty four, they had Amateur Knight before the regular show. Steven Wright, it's the headliner, and he found me in the club. He had watched Hammate Night and he came up and he told me, he said, you need to be doing this. You should be a comic, and which kind of reinforced what my wife said. And so I went in the next day, and I told my boss, I'm like, I'm quitting IBM. And my mother when I told my mother I had quit.
That's our first question was asked about your parents' perception.
Yeah, I got there eventually. My mom's first question was, are you on the dope. I'm not sure what thud dope was. Are you on the dope? We can get you help? And I'm like no, I said, but I think I can do this, and I don't want to be sitting around when I'm sixty going what if I'd try that? And I tell my kids, I said, you need some hold your nose and jump moments in your life. And so my first real gig was New Year's Eve of eighty four with Sindbad and so I think I was making it out. That was what year eighty four, So I think I was making like thirty two grand a year at IBM, and I had health and dental insurance. My first year of comedy eighty five, first full year, I did four hundred and six shows and I made eight three hundred dollars for the year, which is like twenty bucks a show.
So at that point, man, you've given Like at that point, at that volume, you've really given up a lot of normal life.
Oh god, yeah, yeah, you're not doing anything. When I would go out to do the week at the comedy club, my wife would give me thirty bucks to live on for the week, and that was gas money and food money, and you were hoping the club gave you a free meal.
If a club served food.
A lot of times the comics could eat. We used to roll pennies and when we had enough, we'd go.
To the movies. That was our dates.
Really you lived like that, Oh yeah, dude, with no money, so broke. I left Atlanta. One time I had a gig at a comedy club that was in a holiday inn in Sarasota, Florida. I drove down there, and when I got there, the guy said.
Well did you say that? Where was the gig?
Sarasota, Florida, But in a holiday in. They're a little nightclub there, and but the deal was they gave you a hotel room for the week while you did this. And when I got there, the guy said, dude, he said, last night was our last night. We're not making money. We closed And I'm like, so you're out of business? Why just driven nine hours? I went in the lobby bathroom and pee and bought a coke and got back in the car. So I've driven nine hours and now I'm turning around driving back home. But I haven't got paid. I don't have a credit card, and I'm like, God, I hope I got enough money to get home for gas. And I stopped making Georgia at about three in the morning, and I'm digging for change underneath the car seat. You know, Oh, we got forty cents. Let me put that in gas in the car. And I got to South Atlanta, where I grew up. In the red lights on I'm like, I'm not going to make it home. So I pull off the interstate into a gas station and I'm trying to figure out I don't even have a quarter to call my wife. And a guy I went to high school with pulled up to get gas and I went over to him and I said, dude, I'm so embarrassed, but I left home this morning without my wallet. I didn't want to tell him I was that broke. I said, can I borrow five bucks? He's like, yeah, oh, hell yeah. So I got home. Years later, he came to my concert and he goes I remember loading you and I said, dude, I was so broke.
I had no money to get home. I said, let me pay you back.
And he's like, nope, I want you to owe it to me because it's a much better story.
Yeah, and some of it still hasn't. It still hasn't paid me back. That's that's that's incredible though, that you went through all that. I mean, it's great that but looking back, yeah, it's it was good. It made oh I think it made me important man better. I had a hunger to get better at it, you know. You know people say that comics have like a there's like a lot of the more chase and a it's got to be fueled somewhere, right. Yeah. I always there's like a there's like some sort of demon that needs to be slay, you know, or else you're not funny, you know what I mean, Like like if everything's just gravy all the time, you don't get a chance to be funny. Yeah.
I always heard there they're laughing on the outside, crying on the ends. Sure, but I think it's like human beings, we're we're all different. I think I was probably affected by my dad leaving because I could make my dad laugh when I saw him. Well, that was approval God. So it probably made me work at being funnier. But I was wired this way. I came from a funny family. I was wired creative. Part of the reason that I flunked out of college was I was going to Georgia Tech, which was an engineering school, and that wasn't my strength. I remember taking an English class there and writing a story about deer hunting, and the English teacher goes, have you ever thought about being a writer. Maybe you're not an engineer, Maybe you should be a writer. I remember being in high school and I had no money to buy my girlfriend a birthday present. I saw there was a speech contest at the Elks Lodge that paid fifty bucks.
I wrote a.
Speech, went down there and won. You know, I had taken my girlfriend the red lobster. Maybe here we go.
So what happened with flunking out of college.
I was at the wrong place. It wasn't my gift, you know, And I didn't know what my gift was. But from where I stand now, like God made me this way, I see the funny in things. It doesn't mean that I don't get mad or I don't get sad, but I always look for the funny in it, and I do believe it's a gift. And I think I'm a writer. In any great comic is a writer. You just have to have that brain and you're a writer. We don't do it necessarily because it's fun. It ain't fun.
No, I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy the act. If you have a hard time with that, doing it is not like doing It's not fun. There's a writer, Ian Frasier, and he said, when he was little, he pictured being a writer. He pictured writers sitting there and they're typing and they're kind of chuckling to themselves, you know. And then only later do you realize that it's just like it's just doing it is not enjoyable.
It's not enjoy the menu. You stand up the men, you stand up finished product. When you look back and you go, yeah, man, now all right. Let me ask you a question, because I actually asked Bruce Springsteen this, Like I have a pad next to my bed. I've had it for thirty years with a pen on it, and I can write in the dark. But so because you always think you're going to remember it, and you never do so I've learned, like, rite something about as your body's relaxing to go to sleep, ideas start coming. And I've learned to just write a sentence where I can remember it in the morning. But I also have a pad next on my bathroom counter. I bet sixty percent of the things I think of are in the shower. Oh and so I get out of the shower, and I actually asked, springstand and so where do you write the most?
Oh? No, I write a lot of stuff in the shower. Man. Oh really?
Oh yeah, so there must be when I'm driving in the shower and right before I'm going to bed.
Is usually those times. There's a there's a band I like a bit trampled by turtles. Now great name the singers. This guy Dave Simonett. He's really good lyrically. And the other night he left his uh, he accidentally left his little notebook at my house. It's sitting on my counter right now, and I keep wanting looking that little notebook, but I can't bring myself to looking there. I feel like it could be like a betrayal kind of is. But I'm real curious about it. For a writer, I have cracked it. I look at it, and I think, man, whan I look in at that notebook? Yeah, but then I feel like I'd be violating some kind of guest host bond, you know, if I found it on the street, sure, but he left it my house. See that's why we don't crack it open. We just look at it.
I was interested in doing this with you because you're a weird combo in that you're very capable, but you're creative, which are not usually like most really creatives I know can't tie their sh u, can't fill up their gas tank, and that's kind of normal.
I had a dad that pounded all that India.
Yeah, he didn't give a lick about the creative No, mine didn't either, But it was like.
He wrote something. It was on a it was on graph paper, yeah, or on a two by four. You know. That's uh.
But I think you and I are have that in common, is we're capable, but we're creative as well. Rogan's like that, So it's a weird mix, uh, which because I'm kind of fascinated by the writer side of you. I saw where Steve Martin won a writing award and he said, this means more to me than anything goes.
Writing's hard, yeah, And I'm like, dude, I get it. You know it's well yeah, because you guys get like like comics, you get known for the performative part, but prior to the performative parts, the writing part. Do you know what a writer's minds? It's kind of the end of it. You're a writer.
It's funny because I'm kind of a physical comic and people will ask me, do you practice in front of a mirror?
No? I never think about the performance. Do you ever have to watch yourself? I hate to watch myself. You don't know what you look like. I cringe.
Like when I used to do Johnny Carson and you'd film it like at four or five in the afternoon, and you'd come home and it would come on. I'd watch the whole show until I came home. Then I'd get up and leave the room because I hate the way I talk, I hate the way I look. I did, and my wife would be in the other room, going, it's really good, come watch it, and I'm like, no, I can't.
I can't. You hate the way you look? What do you wish you look like? Now? I don't know? Something different?
Yeah, but uh, with comedy. It was always the writing, and you know, and it's kind of like, I know, when you do it well that the audience thinks, oh he just walked out here and.
Just thought of this.
Oh yeah, but I know, I remember when I was still doing amateur nights. Lena was always so nice to young comics.
Was he very patient.
And we're sitting at the waffle house and he said, your goal should be to write one new minute a week. Now, think about that. Your goal should be to write one new minute a week because you're special every year, And well it does. And in my mind, I'm thinking, are you out of your mind? I can write twenty or thirty minutes a week.
No, he was right.
If you can write one minute that a room full of strangers are going to laugh at every time you say it. Over the course of a year, you've got a new you've got a new album, you've got a new special, you know, whatever it is. And but that wasn't easy. I mean, you had to be working to get sixty new minutes a year, which was always so sad because you do a special on crap. All that work now got to start all.
Over, walk me through and the flow of the flow of an idea if you don't practice front of a mirror, so you get like an observation that like your wife's butts cold when she climbs in bed, Yeah, how her bucket cold? Yeah. You drive around and your tract or whatever, and you think about that and you think that's funny. You never going in the gate like that. It just lives in your head. Then you try it out like you never do, like, hey, film me talking about this.
It's like it starts with a with a thought, and then I'm like, like if I thought of something when maybe I think this is funny, like and you and I were having a conversation, I'd figure out a way to work it into the conversation and to see and if you laughed, I went, Okay, that's a valid thought.
And then so you try it out like you try it out in your buddies on them knowing it. Yeah.
And then so in the early days, I always envisioned it like Clay. I would go out there and throw an idea out, say it's five sentences and three of them worked, So I'd keep the three that worked, get rid of the two that didn't, and then the next night I'd try two or three more, and so it was like adding a little piece of clay every night, and there, over a course of a month, you've got a new ten minute bit. As I've gotten older, I kind of did the opposite is I would start with a big glob and just go out there and try it, which I don't know why, but everything that didn't work, I'd cut it off and cut it off and just kept and so in the early days, my bits were two and three minutes long. Now they tend to be twenty and thirty minutes long, right, really long pieces.
When you say a bit, you mean like you'll do that, You'll spend that time on a subject. Yeah, like having a kidney stone, you know. So, but you're not going to get done with that in two minutes. No.
Well, and here's my thought. If you go to all the trouble to set it up, which is the part you're not getting a laugh. Once you get it set up, why not go you got a harvest, big deep and get like Jim Gaffigan talking about bacon. You know, I'm a comic, and I'm like, how long can you talk about bacon for two or three minutes? At minute twenty of gafficking. I've got my hands in my head going, how can you talk about bacon for twenty minutes?
This is hilarious. Yeah, that's a good observation. You gotta set you gotta set the story up. Yeah, but if you've gotten to start spinning off and then it needs to spin off jokes? Yeah, yeah? What uh? When you were? Not when you were? Because as you meet comics, are you guys always bound? Like do you feel that you're bound to other comics through the comedy or do you feel like the sort of political and social differences do? I mean, like, do you run into you when you're doing running another comics and like, is it like you're sort of like the redneck guy from the south and so you're ostracized or is it just the that comedy brings your whole circle of professional colleagues together.
I mean, I think when you're starting out, it's so competitive and everybody's trying to get a hand on the ledge that you're really cut throat with each other. And you know the thing about the redneck jokes? They were one liners, and so we live in an age where nobody does one liners. But they were easy to remember. They were easy to retell you know what I mean, And so I could do them on the radio, and I could do ten of them, so there's ten laughs and people could remember them, they could repeat them. But it was a way for people to remember my name. But at the height of it, it was three minutes out of an hour and a half show.
And so for.
People that thought that was all I did, I'm like, no, you haven't watched me. Mostly what I do is material about my wife and my family and my kids. And but it was a way for them to remember their name. I find the longer you do it, you realize it's a wonderful job.
But it's hard.
You you don't last unless you work hard at it. It's like, you know, I love to look for arrowheads. If I walk into guy's house and he's got a display case full of unbroken arrowheads, I knew that took a long time. That took a long long time to find that many unbroken era heads. The same way with a comic, and so you can can I have a respect for each other.
I want to get return this. If I want to tell you another metric. Okay, you consider how many mountain lions have you seen? That's a metric for time spent time spent messing around out How many of you seen Not many? I spent a lot of time messing around on outside. Yeah, I think I've had I've seen six that weren't being chased by dogs. Well that's pretty cool. Well I got a Boddy who spends a lot of time outside. Last time I talked to him, he was on like thirty five or something. Oh my gosh. I didn't mean interrupt the chain of thought. I I'm know what you're saying. Like, I had to get back to a bow.
One time and I was trailing them and h Glenn, my farm manager who you met, went back to get us some water and all, and so I just sat down and when he came back, he goes, dude, there's mountain lion tracks in your footprints. Oh yeah, and my dumb ass is sitting at the bottom of a tree with my bow.
You know, it's a wonder. I wasn't lunch. Yeah, I don't want to bring the chain of thought, but I was just thinking about your awareness of that collection and being like that is a lot a lot, it's a lot of work. Like you're dedicated, you're good at it. You know.
Well, yeah, you know, out of every thing I've done professionally, the thing that I'm proud of, Stob is I've sold more comedy records than anybody that's ever lived.
Is that right? Yep? Crin should put that in the damn bio. I know, nice job, Corrin.
So go eat some more Moushoe Manza balls.
You had to write along?
You sold more comedy records and Cosby Carlon and Eddie Murphy delirious. Yes, yeah, My first comedy records sold almost four million copies. The second one did almost the same. The physical salities, yeah physical, these are album But what that tells me is, I'll tell you what it tells me. Somebody most popular ass comedian, Well, it means you were working, you were writing, Yeah, you know, And I mean I've written like twenty seven books and invented games. I've been very lucky to do a lot of things creatively. But out of everything, that tells me you worked at it, you worked, which is you know, It's part of me with hunting. I want to do it. I want to do things that aren't easy. Like when I was a kid, I just wanted to shoot a deer that had antlers. I just wanted to kill a deer, any antler, It didn't matter. You know, that's enough, you know, yeah, yeah, And there's cycles hunters go through. Then you want to shoot a bigger one. You want to shoot a bigger one. But you get to a point like because I was doing a lot of hunting shows. I was doing hunting shows for real tree and bucks of Takamani, and I was getting to go places and hunt really cool things and shoot really big deer. And I had a year where I shot a thirteen point deer. He's out there in the in manland, out there, huge deer. Shot him with a gun and three hundred and fifty yards. And then I came back to my farm, and my farm enginer only bow hunted, and I was starting to play around with it. That's your buddy here, Glenn. And the next weekend I shot one hundred and thirty eight inch deer, but he was poping young with a bow and arrow, and I sat up there and I just shook, and I could remember being fifteen years old, and the deer I shot at three hundred and fifty yards had no idea that I was there. I didn't really have to be that stealth. I was a long way away, but the one I shot at thirty yards that was close and personal. And I remember I called my wife. I never called my wife when she's cooking dinner back at home, and I'm.
Like, oh my god, I just I shot a fuck with my boat.
And I thought, this is what I want to feel like, this is what I want hunting to feel like. And so I'm like, I'm not doing a gun anymore. I'm gonna hunt with a bow.
I was horrible at it.
I mean, it took me two or three year years to even get I messed up. I kept drawing at the wrong time, you know, so you sat there for two hours waiting on a dough to come up, and now you draw at the wrong time, spooker and she runs off, and You're like, okay, I gotta wait till her head's behind a tree. But there was something about wanting to do it the hard way. And once I had started being pretty good at shooting deer with it, I'm like, I want to go hunt an elk.
I want to, but not with a gun. I want to. And then it was a moose, and then it was I want to.
Hunt it like I'd always kind of been fascinated with bears, but I had zero interest in nothing wrong with somebody doing this. I didn't want to shoot one over a barrel of doughnuts. I wanted to go find a bear and shoot them with my bow. Well it ended up doing that because and I don't know if you ever feel like this, but like I would watch videos of people hunting moose with a bow and I kept going, holy crap, that is so scary. I mean, like, roll up in a ball, go oh my dude, they're so close, They're so so big, so big. There's part of me that goes, do you have enough balls to do this? And I wanted to find out. I'm like, I wanted to push myself to go, do you have enough courage to go stand there with a stick and a string fifteen yards from this two thousand pounds animal. And it's funny like after doing it, because my wife's first question was, were you scared because I shoot this big bullet fifteen yards? And I said, in and of the moment, no, did.
You guys call that bullet? Yeah? So he was.
That's a timidating mane Oh yeah, I mean he's got his eyes rolled back. Well, here was the worst part. So we're going up. We're in a john boating up a river and I'm in the front of the boat looking for tracks or looking for sign and we've been in the boat for four or five hours and then I finally saw tracks coming out and hey, he got tracked. He went over and looked, said, it's a big bull beach. The boat go up into some kind of vegetation. It was about this high, kind of little red berries in there. And as we're just kind of standing there listening for the bull, I look down and at my feet there is a pile of poop with steam coming up off of it. I mean steam is coming off. And I look at the guide and I go moose, and he goes grizzly, and I'm like, okay, So there's grizzly with steam coming off of it, which means he ain't far away. And then and then the w and now we're now we've got a moose coming, and I forget about the grizzly, but and the and he's coming in to fight. He destroys a ten foot tree, I mean down to nothing. He wants to fight, and and but he's kind of hanging up at like fifteen yards because he can't see us, and and in and of the moment, I was not scared, and I thought, oh, I'd be petrified. My only thought was turn so I can get a stick in you.
I need.
I need an ethical I mean, I need a shot.
I need.
And it was so hyper focused on what do I have to do to get an arrow in this? And he finally turned to walk off, and I look, and there's a there's a hole, and I'm so I go to full draw and I wait till he fills the hole, and I shoo to me, goes thirty yards and folds up. As soon as that happens. Now I've got the dreddline and I'm doing the stinky leg and shaking it and all. But in the moment, I wasn't scared, and I didn't know that about myself. I got you, and I'm like, oh, that's cool. You didn't freeze up, you didn't turn around and run away. You held it together. I didn't know that about myself. Do you uh are you into bows? Do you just go to the bow shop and be like, get me set up?
And I want to show.
I'm like, dude, I'm like, so, I was hunting with a Matthews for a while and I liked it, and but then I got a psc bow that just seemed to fit me. Like when I go in to full draw, I wasn't it wasn't jumping on me. I could hold it, I could draw it straight back. I've hunted with the same boat for eight years.
You didn't. Oh, yeah, I'm not.
A junkie on anything. If I get a truck, I like, I'm like, I don't need a new truck. It's Look at the watch I'm wearing. I mean, I've I've done okay in life. I'm wearing a hundred dollars watch with a broken band, you know, because it tells time. Well, I'm not a latest and greatest thing kind of guy. Yeah, I just found a bow that I liked. I'm like, I like this one. I'm gonna stick with this.
You mentioned you mentioned hunt arrowheads. What was your introduction to that.
I had found one or two, I think as a kid. But Glenn, my farm manager, had looked for him his whole life, and I'd go to his house and look at his collection. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Well, and I think becoming a bow hunter, as you start to go, damn, these people, Oh these people were pretty gas.
You were looking at it too from a hunting perspective. Yeah, I know a lot of guys that are into arrowheads that don't look at it from a hunting perspective, which always can comprised me.
I'm fascinated by everything they do. Like they took rocks and they learned to make a knife. They learned to make a projectile point, they learned to make a grinder. A bowl and a grinder, let's mash up acorns or corn or whatever. They were such capable people. So when I look at artifacts, I'm thinking, ay, if I pick it up and go, all right, I'm the first human being in seven thousand years to hold this. But mostly I think about there were some woman or some man sitting here making this, not thinking oh this is pretty or this is artistic. They're thinking I need to carve up that squirrel tonight for dinner. They were making it to live, and I think that's what got me kind of fascinated with it. And the first trip I ever went on, Glenn took me on a trip up to North Carolina. He had a buddy that was planting strawberries, and.
Yeah, if you guys, we'll go. Every day you'll travel, you'll go like on a hunting trip, but to go if you get an opportunity to go. Look something like I just.
Did a thing for wounded warriors out in Texas. Well, I knew it was going to be out there, and I called a friend that was close by. I go, hey, you got any buddies of the arrowhead hunt? And he goes, yeah, I got a friend that loves it. And I'm like, find out if we can go with him. So I fly out there and do something good, do the Wounded Warrior show.
They raise like a million bucks. It was cool.
But then the next morning we're out looking for arrowheads, so try to combine them together now, and.
Then you have a lot of stuff from this property you were showing me. Yeah, but I don't mean to criticize it, but you even said it too. It's like it's ugly. It's ugly, but it's ugly because of.
They didn't have They didn't have rock to work, they didn't have flint. They had courts, which is very hard to make thin and pretty. It was functional, but they just don't make pretty arrowheads. But like, I made friends in Arkansas that have beautiful flint. I made friends in Texas that have beautiful flint. I have friends in Kentucky. So hell, we'll get in the car and drive to Kentucky. If somebody says, I've got a plowfield and it's rained.
Yeah, what were you mentioned? You're going where someone was putting in strawberries.
Yeah, and so they had plowed this field and it was going to rain, and they're fixing the planet. Yeah, they're fixing, but they hadn't planted it yet, but they plowed it. But when you plow it, it's kind of dusty and you can't really see anything. So you need it to rain in a time or two. But the guy said, he said, y'all better be up here in the morning or the meth heads will kill it, cause the meth heads will go out there and look for airheads and sell them. That's my kind of meth head man. Yeah, I never heard of that before.
Dude.
You can go up there. It can rain that night, and you can be there at sunrise and the field is covered in footprints and you're like, how is this humanly possible? How do you do this? And so the first place I ever went with him, i'd walked thirty feet from the truck and I saw some thought it was a.
Piece off attractor, like a spark plug. Picked it up.
I'm looking around. They had and pottery and things, and as I'm doing it, I'm like, I don't feel like plastic and it's a.
Pipe, you know. Yeah, so fine, it's because you were you were when you're doing that. Like how when you're looking on the ground you'll sometimes hold something in you just kind of worry it.
Yeah, I worry it. That's great because I'm always got something in my hand whatever, the most interesting things. Yeah, oh that's a cool rock. You'll walk around with it in your hand. It's whirl it in your thumb.
Yeah. So uh.
And I'm like, crap, that's not a tractor part. That's a pipe. It was a stone pipe. And I go over to Glenn, who's been looking for thirty years, and I go, dude, look what I found. He was so pissed he turned around and walked straight away from me, didn't talk to me the rest of the day.
Mmm. But then I was hooked. If you ever do go do Rogan show, you should bring that pipe. Let him, uh, let him pull a rip, Let him pull a rip off that pipe. Man, he probably get a real kick out of it. Yeah, Native American. Yeah, why not, right, he'd probably love that. So.
Uh how much time he's spend hunting though, Like you get some time out now, Yeah, I get some time out.
You know.
I'm kind of weird. Like I just had a friend that went to Africa, because I've been to Africa, but not to hunt. Been to Africa like six times. I'd like to do it, but I'm kind of weird. Like he wanted to go hunt a leopard. I have no desire. I don't want to shoot something I'm not going to eat. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just this is me. This is the way I'm weird. There's some guys that have foot fetishes, right, and I'm and I look at them and go, have you seen boobs? Because they're they're not bad either, you know, but uh, I mean but to each is, well, here's the thing about the foot fetish too. What he views as gerie I call a flip flop, right, I mean, but so when I say that, I'm not being critical of somebody that wants to hunt a leopard. And that's just the way I'm wired is if I shoot something, I want to eat it. So but I would like to go I'd like to go to Africa and bow hunt, and I still hunt with a gun, Like I just go, Yeah, Well.
I thought, maybe you gave it all up for your bowl big game. I hunt with a bow. But like, like, I just got turned onto duck hunting. I had my neck fhews ten years ago and the doctor said two things. Don't look up and don't shoot a shotgun. That rules I'll duck hunt.
Well apparently not, because I tried it and I like it. And now I'm like, I'll I'll deal with the pain because this is a lot of fun.
Well, what's in your head? Is there? Like a like how do you how do you tell when you've scratched the itch for a year? Right? Like for me, I'll if there's I like the hunt turkeys a lot, okay, so late May whatever, I'll be in my head. I don't think of how many turkeys I got. I don't think of how many days I hunted turkeys. I think of like, well, how many successful hunts was I in on? Yeah? Meaning my kid got one my buddy got one like that I was trying to shoot. I could shoot none of them, wouldn't matter. And if I finished the spring and I was like, man, I was in on six turkey kills. That's pretty good, then I'll be like, oh, that's pretty good spring. Yeah. You know, when the big game season ends, when it's all said and done, I'll kind of look at was there one particular Did I get some particular animal that I was real excited about? And do I have a whole mountain of stuff started up in freezers? Yeah? And if it's checked, I'm good. You know, how do you how do you know? How do you know that your hunting life as well?
I think we go through stages as a hunter. First it's I want to shoot a deer. Now I want to shoot a deer with horns. Now I want to shoot a deer with bigger horns.
Now I want to.
Shoot a really big deer. And so I've been through all those stages. Now I'm like you, if I can take a kid who's never done it and introduce it to him, that's every bit of rewarding, is shooting a.
Deer like that.
I think that's the thing I loved about bow hunting. Uh, And kind of that conversion on big game stuff was I'd shot a lot.
Of big deer with it.
Shotting, there's your might be a redneck word shotting shotting, I'd shotten a lot of.
Yeah.
The guy that didn't like crescendo, he's got real problems with shot He's don't even know where to start when he writes that letter. But but like when you were gun hunting and you'd go, hey, there's a deer, there's oh crap, it's a doe. When you're bow hunting, you're like, oh, hell, here comes a dough. You know, everything's in play, Everything is in play. And I like that about it because it's hard. Man, it's hard to get a stick. You got to let him get. And a friend of mine who loves big bucks, he said, well, what do you do if you're bow hunting and the buck comes out of one hundred yards across the field? And I said, he wins today, But now I know a way that he where he likes to cross, and I'm going to move my stand closer. But he wins today.
And you're excited about having a grandkit.
Oh yeah, Oh, the greatest joy of my life. Honest to God, you get to the point where you think you've kind of got life figured out.
I had no idea I was going to love a grandkid this much. I got a body that's got in your grandkid. He told me he likes that grandkid better, and he ever liked any of his kids.
Oh, I told you, I help my kids. I hold my grandson and I go. I love you, and I would lay down my life for you. I would die for you. But I do not love you as much as I love him. I don't love my wife as much as I love you. He is my favorite human being of all time. Well, and I had all girls, and I love being girls. I love being a girl. Dad, what was that track record? Everybody in my family had girls. We had eleven girls in a roow. He's the first boy in fifty eight years, like you and your you have you two siblings and you.
Guys run off.
Yeah, and no boys. So he's the first boy. And like yesterday morning, he comes out in his pajamas, he's pulling on his green ruber boots, he's got a stumb in his mouth. He goes, checks, let's go ride a tractor. And I'm like hell, yeah, let's go ride a tractor. I let him drive the truck. I let him sit my light, laugh and drive.
He's two and a half. That's fun.
Yeah, but god he's whatever bat I ever did, he makes up for. I've got a great life, you know. I've made a fabulous live in doing something that would have done for free, because I love what I do.
Love.
I love that comedy. It's it's very rewarding. You're making people laugh. It's it's like the release five that keeps people spoiler from exploding you. But it's not easy. I love the fact that you never get you never get it figured out. After forty years, you would think I would know what people are going to laugh at and what they're not going to I still don't know. She's like, it's like the woman you can't figure out. But that's what keeps her interesting is I can't figure out. Because after forty years, I can go up there and go, hey is this funny and it's crickets nothing.
And you're like, wow, really it's not funny. So I have that as a career. I have a fun which I love. Man, I don't need I don't need shiny cars.
I don't need. I love this. I love I love being able to grow my own food. I love being able to hunt my own food. I love being able to share a sunrise, you know, with friends of mine. And I've never spent one day in the woods where I went crap that wasn't worth it mm hmm, because you always see something, see a hall, catch a squirrel, or you know, like today you and I stopped and there's two otters chasing fish man. Yeah, you're like, that was cool. Yeah, there's always something like that. So I've got a farm, I've got a great job. I've got a wife that I adore, been married for forty years, got grandkids, I got kids out of door. I'm like, I don't know what I did, but thank you. I have got a great life. Well, thank you for coming on the show.
Man.
Dude, I'm fascinated by you. I like what you do, and I like that you humanize hunters.
You know.
It's like I was doing something in La and they were you know, you you guys just shoot everything you see. I said, are you kidding me? I said, During the course of a deer season, I will see four hundred deer. I might shoot four dos in a buck. I said, and you tell me you love them, you don't love them more than I do, because I'm out on a bulldozer creating habitat for them. I'm out burning to give them more native food.
I'm out. Don't tell me you love them more. Night. No, you could say to them and said, if you don't think I love deer, I'd like to take you for a little drive. Yeah.
But what I want is as many as my land can hold with them being healthy. I want it right there to the top. But it's it's not an infinite number of deer. So and I've seen chronic wasting disease. I've seen it's when nature takes care of it. It's ugly, much more humane. And I don't and I'm not shooting them. It's not the killing. It's every one of them somebody eats. It's it's a food source, you know. So, and if you don't like it, that's okay. I don't have to like everything you do, but I like the fact that you show that you know you just you don't have to like it, but I do. And it's legal, and it's it's good, it's fascinating. It's the biggest classroom in the world is the outdoors.
Yep, well man, thanks for thanks for being a hunter, Thanks for making everybody laugh and making everyone laugh without capitalizing on hate and discord, but just laughing at yourself. Man, Yeah, laughing at ourselves. And I think we've.
Kind of forgotten how to do this is right now in society people are people have to be right, which means you have to be wrong, which means we're not going to have conversation because I'm not going to engage in a conversation where I have.
To be wrong.
And we need to give up our need to be right. Because what you find as you age is things that you argued vehemently for as you were twenty. Now I find myself argued vehemently against. I'm like you, learn and you know, we're all wrong about something. We're The truth is, we're all wrong about a lot of things. But we have to engage in those conversations. So, like with you, I want to know what you know that I don't know. Those are the conversations I.
Like to have. I think a way to describe aging. One way to describe aging would be it's a process by which you become less and less interested in your own opinion. Agreed.
Yeah, I told my kids, I said, I miss my thirty year old body, but I wouldn't trade my sixty year old mind and soul.
To get it back. Because you realize so.
Many things you wanted to fight about when you're young, you get old, it ain't worth it. It'll sort itself out. Half the things you worry about more than half. Ninety percent of the things you worry about, they never happen, and so you kind of there is a wisdom that comes, and that wisdom comes with Everything's not a confrontation you and I. Here's the thing I think politically, you can have two people on total opposite ends of the spectrum. But if you sat them down and you said, what do you want out of lie? What do you care about? What you we would agree on eighty five percent of the same things. We all want to be able to take care of our family. We want to be able to take care of our kids, We want them to live in a safe place. We want to have food in our stomach. Fifteen percent would be different. What we should celebrate is that eighty five percent that we're alike. You and I grew up in different parts of the country different ways. But as we sit here and talk, we realize, oh, Steve and I are a lot alike on this and the parts that are different. That's what makes you Steve and what makes me Jeff. But what we want to do right now is we want to fight and scream and yell at each other about the fifteen percent instead of going crap, eighty five percent You and I want the same thing. Why why aren't we based in that we can talk about the other. But how boring would it be if we all want it and thought alike, you know, crap?
That would be.
That's one of the things I love about nature is And if you don't have faith, I don't care. I do, but I sit there and go God's infinitely creative. Like there's thousands of different kinds of trees. If you ask me to come up with trees after four.
I'm like, I'm out of idea. Like I'm gonna do a little one, a medium. Yeah, I'm done.
I'm done. Or you know, types of things in the ocean. Man, there's a fish, you know, and you go, crap, how many different kinds of fish are there? Well, for people that love the outdoors, it's always That's what I mean. It's kind of a it's a classroom.
You're like, all of this works together.
You know, as the squirrels sitting there chewing on the pine combe, some of those kernels are going down and into the soil and becoming pine trees. Well, there's you know, within a square foot of dirt, there's forty thousand organisms living in that and they all do something. These these leaves above it that are decaying or feeding something that feeds something else, and it's all tied together, and it's way more brilliant and smarter than I have the compet the ability to understand. So I'm just going to sit here and soak it all in and go, wow, isn't that cool.
It's a great place to do that and experience that. And the thing that you were getting at a mintical about that eighty five fifteen percent eighty five percent of stuff brings us together, fifteen percent is different. There's been a like this idea I've been toying around in my head about when I and I've talked about this a number of times, is I compare sometimes my lived experience, right, like what happens me going about my day, going to a gas station down the road from here, whatever what happens, going about my day, and then me reading about what my American life is supposed to be like, yeah, and in reading about what my American life, life is supposed to be like, it's supposed to be defined by polarization, political violence, right, yeah, whatever, all of this economic strain, social economic upheaval, you know. And I'm like, go, Okay, I got it, that's what life's like. But why is that not line up at all with what your experience with what happens when I'm like talking to my neighbors, who I don't know the first thing about where they are at politically, or why does that not happen when I go into a gas station? Why are people cool when I get into an uber? Why am I able to you know what I mean? Like, how am I supposed to be having this but instead I'm having this? Well? In which one's those things? Which of those do you believe? Which is the truth? I'm leaning toward thinking that the lived one is the truth. It is the truth. You follow me.
I've gotten to the point I say when I walk on stage, and I do I said, I'm standing on the sides of the stage. I remind myself that everybody that I'm going to look at is going through some kind of a struggle. And now it might be a physical struggle, it might be emotional, it might be financial, but they're going through something. And that's why, really my whole life, I'm like, just have grace with people because you don't know their backstory, you don't know what they're going through, So have a little grace with them. And I think that's the cool thing about laughter is you know, we're all in a struggle. That's why I love what I do is I can go visit kids in the hospital and they might have my book, or they might have my game, or they might have my DVD, and they didn't know I was coming. So there's something that I've created that has given them an escape from the struggle that they're going through. And I went, oh, that's kind of a cool benefit to this. But yeah, we don't give each other much grace. You know, you don't know, Like I worked it a totally under the radar, didn't want anybody to know but get up every week and I worked down at a homeless shelter in downtown Line for twelve years get up on Tuesday morning five o'clock and go down there and work. And my opinion of homeless used to be like, oh, you're too lazy to work.
Or you're well.
Most of them were in some kind of addiction. But if you learn their story, if you come to learn their story, something bad happened. They were molested, they were abused, they were and so the addiction wasn't really the problem that that was the symptom. That was I got to numb this painful feeling and then you start having grace with them going crap, dude, I would have numbed too. We need to get back as a as a society, just start doing that with each other. Uh happened some grace, So quit yelling life's too short.
Mm hmmm. Crack some jokes instead. Yeah, fry up some venison.
Pry up some venison. Crack some jokes. If you don't want to eat the venison, fine hand it to me.
I'll eat it. Well, man, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Well, I thanks for the tour of the place.
Yeah, I've always been such an admirer of what you do. So it's I'm honored that you would be here, that you would take the time to be here.
Oh no, Once I realized you weren't going to come to me, I decided to come to you. So so suck it, Rogan. Not really.
I love what he does too. Thanks a lot, man, Thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure, come back and hunt and fish.
I will. I'll bring my kids.
Yeah, please bring your kids. That'd be the number one reason you guys could stay here and break everything in here.
Great. Thank you.
Rack coon pecker, old man in my mountains, keep his hat together, Rack coon pecker. Use this tooth thick. It'll last forever. Rack coon pecker, best toothpick in town. Well, you see, now, I was driving down the road and I uh stumbled upon this sheer raccoon there, and I ran him over, hit him with my car. Looked at this old son of a gun and seeing that he has a pecker, not just any kind of pecker, a rack coon pecker. Put him in your hat. It holds it together, Rack coon pecker. I'm in my tooth. Raccoon pecker, gonna pick it out, raccoon pecker.
Leave it on a tree.
It for dicks.
The weather.
Rain falling off.
You know it's rain.
It as dry as a bone.
It's it's it's right stiff as hell.
It's old ice cold. Old lady gonna give you the bone because it's a racon pecker. Can I put it in my hand to keep my hat together?
Peanut it, and my tooth is gonna pick it on, or raccoon picker. There ain't no doubt
