I travel all over the country
for stand-up.
I love it.
Travel all over.
Favorite place to travel,
will tell you,
is around the South.
That's my favorite for a couple
of reasons.
One,
I love looking at billboards,
[Audience Laughing]
and the South has the best
because if you keep your
eyes open,
you start to realize
people are
learning things on billboards
in the South.
You should not be learning
from a billboard.
[Audience Laughing]
And it's amazing.
[Audience Laughing]
I was down in Georgia,
about an hour outside
of Atlanta,
I saw this one huge board,
giant letters.
All it said was,
“Never shake a baby.”
[Audience Laughing]
I don't have kids but if that's
where you’re learning that,
you definitely shouldn't have
them either.
[Audience Laughing]
Right?
I don't want to meet
the guy that's helping.
Just one angry guy in the front
of a car like,
[Exhales Deeply]
[Audience Laughing]
Never?
[Audience Laughing]
I had no idea.
Nobody told me.
No one.
Not once.
Not from high school
health class,
still the nurses let us take it
home.
So thank you billboard.
Like—
[Audience Laughing]
I have another tick
when I travel.
I drive to a lot of gigs.
This is very rare
I get to fly anywhere.
When I'm on the road,
I count Waffle Houses
everywhere I go.
Are you guys familiar?
Some of you?
Maybe like three or four
and the rest of you—
Well, okay, let me ask you if
you're not familiar,
where do you guys go at like
1 in the, at 1 in the morning fo
breakfast food?
Denny's?
Okay.
A Waffle House is like
if a Denny's
came from a broken home.
That's
[Audience Laughing]
an accurate description.
And they are everywhere
throughout the South.
I drove from
Raleigh, North Carolina
to Huntsville, Alabama.
It is an 8 and 1/2 hour drive.
There are 37 Waffle Houses.
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah, I did the math.
That is one every 13.5 miles.
That is a diabetic Oregon Trail
is what that is.
[Audience Laughing]
Right?
Dad just stuffs everyone
in the car,
and you got to just follow one
to the next to the next.
You've got to cross the river,
dad loses a foot, and then
most of the family
dies from dysentery.
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah, if 90s video games
taught us anything, it's that
Poo and Fart aren't making it
to Oregon.
[Audience Laughing]
About 10 of you laughed
at that,
[Audience Laughing]
and I like that.
I do because if you laugh
at that joke,
that tells me a little bit about
you as a person.
It does.
It tells me you're
about my age,
and your elementary school
had a computer lab.
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah, and you got to mess
around a couple of hours
on a Tuesday, right?
All your family died by
Independence Rock,
so you went hunting
for 45 minutes.
You wound up with too much
meat to take back to the
Conestoga wagon
because you're gunning down
a buffalo.
On the way you're hitting
squirrels with those little
square bullets.
You got to ford the river,
you've got a caulk the wagon,
you break an axle.
A lot of your oxen died.
Am I still doing this joke
people that have no clue
what I'm talking about?
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah, I am
[Audience Laughing]
and it's called commitment.
I'm an artist, and now I'm
a little light headed.
[Audience Laughing]
Learn a lot about yourself
on the road.
I learned a lot about myself
driving everywhere.
I learned, recently, I have
road rage.
[Audience Laughing]
That's a thing in my life,
but I learned I have small scale
road rage.
You put me on a
major highway
and traffic to slows to a crawl,
I am zen in that moment.
I'm at peace.
Because it's like, okay,
traffic's here, eventually it's
going to move,
I'm going to reach my
destination.
There's nothing to get
upset about.
But you shrink that down
though,
you put me in a grocery store
parking lot
[Audience Laughing]
at 3 PM on a Wednesday,
I will lose my mind every time.
Here's the thing
is I don't think I'm ridiculous.
I don't think I'm ridiculous
because all I want
is courtesy.
That's all I want.
If I pull up to a crosswalk,
stop my car, and give you
the right of way, put a little
pep in your step people.
Yes!
[Audience Laughing]
Exactly.
I don't care who you are.
You pick up that oxygen tank,
and you run, grandma.
[Audience Laughing]
You got a fake hip.
You can't move it a little quick
through this Trader Joe's?
All right.
[Audience Laughing]
I got a little intense.
Let's calm down.
[Audience Laughing]
I do want to talk about
something kind of serious
for a minute.
I love the South.
I'm from the South.
And the more I travel
around this country, the more
I've started to see a prejudice
that I don't appreciate
as the person I am.
And I'm talking, of course,
about the prejudice
against the Southern accent.
[Audience Laughing]
I'm sick of it,
[Audience Laughing]
okay?
Especially in pop culture
and everything.
Everyone loves making fun
of the South.
You've got a TV show
with a character they consider
of lower intelligence,
they always give them a
Southern accent,
and it's got to stop.
[Audience Laughing]
Every show has a character
that pops in for an episode
just like, “What?
“What's going on?
“Well, I'll tell you this.
“My name's Gerald Bob,
“and I don't know nothing
“about this book learning.
“All right?”
[Audience Laughing]
I'm from the South.
We don't sound like that.
We don't all sound like that,
all right?
[Audience Laughing]
I know.
[Audience Clapping]
But the more you travel,
what you start to realize is
nobody's dialect makes them
sound more intelligent.
There's not a hierarchy to it.
You're going to make fun
of the South, that's fine.
But have you ever been to
Boston?
[Audience Laughing]
Oh, what?
You think you're going to go up
there at MIT, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
open a classroom
door and the professor
is going to be like,
[In Accent] “Look,
“we’re building these
“super computers.
“All right.
“Yo, these things are
“wicked fast.”
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah.
[In Accent ] “Actually, hey, if
“you’re interested, real quick,
“pop out back the facility.
“We're building this
“Hadron Collider
“just whipping atoms together
“trying to find the God particle
[Audience Laughing]
“Yeah, if we're successful, you
“know what we’re gonna do?
“We're going to go to dunks
“is what we're going to do.
“We’re gonna go to
“Dunkin' Donuts,
“we're gonna drink a 12-pack
“of Sam Adams,
“we're going to fist fight
“my brother. Go Sox!”
Like that is—
[Audience Laughing]
[Audience Clapping]
You'll never hear that.
[Audience Laughing]
[In Accent] We've got to park
the car.
We're going to park it out back.
Tom Brady left us for Florida.
[Audience Laughing]
You don't like that?
That's fine too.
Go further into the South.
Go into Florida.
Listen to them talk.
It's different and not better.
[Audience Laughing]
And I don't mean Orlando
or Miami.
I mean go an hour outside
of Jacksonville, Florida,
and just listen to people
be like,
[In Accent] “Hey Bobby,
“so you'll hold the wheel
“while I throw this gator
“through the Wendy's
“drive-thru.”
Or whatever,
[Audience Laughing]
whatever they're doing.
[Audience Laughing]
Or you go down around
Tampa, and they're like,
“Carole Baskin
“didn't do it.”
It's like, no.
[Audience Laughing]
No, that's not everybody else's
consensus, Florida.
She did it.
[Audience Laughing]
Can you guys believe how long
it's been since we all met
Joe Exotic?
[Audience Laughing]
Since we all met the greatest
American of all time?
[Audience Laughing]
I loved Tiger King.
Loved it.
I've watched it like nine times.
I watched Tiger King
like uninteresting people
watch The Office.
You get what I'm saying?
[Audience Laughing]
So many times.
Here's the thing.
More than I liked watching
Tiger King,
I liked watching other people
watch it.
[Audience Laughing]
Because you would get people
that would binge the entire
series, then go on Twitter like,
“Can you believe someone
“someone would act like
“that Joe Exotic gentleman?”
And I'm from the South
so I'm like,
yes.
[Audience Laughing]
A guy with a mullet that likes
to blow stuff up.
That's Randy.
He's our Sheriff.
What are we doing?
[Audience Laughing]
Yeah, he's got 9 DUIs
and we keep re-electing him
because he's also the judge,
lawyer, bailiff, mayor.
Like what do we—
[Audience Laughing]
People love to make fun of
Joe Exotic like it's this kind
of rare thing.
It's not.
I don't think people really
realize how many Joe Exotics
exist in this country.
I think as Americans, we like to
act like we're really
cosmopolitan,
you know?
“Oh, I spent time in New York
“and then I jetset to LA.”
That's two cities.
[Audience Laughing]
There's a lot of stuff
in between those cities,
[Audience Laughing]
and it is filled with
Joe Exotics.
[Audience Laughing]
And I sleep better knowing it
[Audience Laughing]
that they're out there
protecting us.
[Audience Laughing]
My gosh, you guys are in Utah.
You think I’d fear a foreign
invasion from the East Coast?
No way.
They're not getting past
West Virginia.
Are you kidding me?
[Audience Laughing]
That's the reason you never
see an Avengers movie
where the heroes
have to go defend Iowa.
[Audience Laughing]
Iowa's fine.
[Audience Laughing]
If some aliens ever came to
Earth and tried to
start something,
they'd get as far as
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
before the last thing they
ever hear is a redneck racking
his shotgun like,
[Cocking Shotgun]
[Laughs]
Roll tide.
Like that would be it.
[Audience Laughing]
That would be it.
[Audience Clapping]
It's not even a Southern thing.
It's not even an
American thing.
It's worldwide.
Rednecks are worldwide.
We should embrace them.
Like, I'll give you an example.
I love Formula 1 racing.
If you're not familiar,
it's basically Europe's NASCAR.
That’s a very simple
explanation,
but it makes my point.
But people think because it's
European, it must be fancy
and posh.
It's not.
You go watch some of
those old races
where they would race
through the streets of
Paris, France.
You will see
legitimate French guys
standing on the curb
of the street
with a glass of wine
and a cigarette
while a rocket filled
with jet fuel
[Audience Laughing]
runs three feet from their face,
and they're like,
“This is the greatest thing
“I've ever seen in my life.”
That is redneck.
[Audience Laughing]
You can't tell me if they
tore down the fences at
Daytona Motor Speedway,
you wouldn't get at least
one guy sitting on the
start finish line on a yeti
like, “Tell them to go around it
[Audience Laughing]
“I paid for this ticket.”
[Audience Laughing]
Australia?
Full of rednecks.
Full of them.
Oh, Steve Irwin?
Rest in peace king.
Listen,
[Audience Laughing]
the crocodile hunter?
He was mouth kissing cobras,
wrestling with gators.
That dude is a different accent
and a Busch Light away
from being from Louisiana.
Can we all agree?
[Audience Laughing]
Rednecks aren't dumb either.
Southerners—
we're not dumb.
People love to make fun of it.
It’s not true.
I mentioned
Huntsville, Alabama
earlier.
If you've never been there,
Huntsville's nickname is
Rocket City
because the Apollo rocket
that put a man on the moon
was invented and built
in Huntsville, Alabama.
Is that not weird to
anybody else?
[Audience Laughing]
All right.
The state that gave us
the Confederate flag
also gave us the rocket
that put a man on the moon?
I think those two things are
more connected than
people want to admit.
[Audience Laughing]
Maybe that's how the
Apollo program started.
It was just two rednecks
hanging out there down there
in Huntsville.
It’s like 1960s. They’re like,
“It's been 100 years
“since the Civil War
“and all these people from
“Pennsylvania,
“Massachusetts think they're
“gonna come down here and
“tell us what to do?
“Not on my watch, Ricky.
[Audience Laughing]
“Here's what I'm thinking.
“You see that grain silo
“over there?
[Audience Laughing]
“I'm gonna need you to
“empty it.
[Audience Laughing]
“And then I’m gonna need
“you to get your hands on all
“the gasoline and black cab
“fireworks you can find.
“And you and me, Ricky,
“we're getting our behinds
“to that not sun.
“That's what we're
“gonna do.”