I live in the Pacific Northwest now.
A lot of people where I live think
I should have a deeper,
more redneck Southern accent
because of where I’m from, which--
you’re nodding, that hurts my feelings.
That’s fine.
That’s okay.
I wanna let you all know in the fine city of Provo
that not all of us sound like extras
from the movie Deliverance, alright?
[audience laughs]
Yeah.
Yeah. Not every child born in the South
is born with like,
one side of their overalls undone,
plucking on a banjo.
[audience laughing]
They’re just like, "Gimme the sweet tea,
"gimme the sweet tea, mama."
[audience laughing]
That’s not how it works, no.
Most children in the South
eventually lose their Southern accents,
I'll have you know.
For me, it happened right around the time
I learned to read.
[audience laughs]
I’m not being a jerk,
you guys just don’t know what it’s like
to be a young Southern man reading a book
and be like, "Hmmm, alright, if that’s how that’s spelled
"I’ve been saying it wrong, that is..."
[audience laughing]
"Is that a new letter, what is that?
"It’s like a "T" but there’s a little thing
"at the bottom of it."
Anyway, who knew there were more than 23 letters?
[audience laughs]
People in Hollywood have two Southern accents they do.
They do redneck, inbred, horrible Southern,
which is basically what I’ve been doing
this entire time.
And then the other one is what I call,
"Plantation owner Southern."
And even if you don’t,
thank you,
even if you don’t know,
she’s a little ahead,
she’ll fill you guys in when you catch up.
She’ll have a PowerPoint,
it’ll be some Spark Notes, it’ll be good.
Plantation owner Southern, even if you haven’t heard it,
you’ve heard it.
It just goes like,
"Oh hello there, I’m not one of those
"dumb Southerners you’ve heard all about,
"I drink mojitos down by the beach
"and read from leather-bound books that I don’t own,"
or whatever.
[audience laughs]
I hate that accent.
I hate it because I know when I hear that accent
in a movie,
I’m about to hear some ignorant stuff go down.
Because that’s somebody be like,
"Oh he’s a rich Southerner,
"give him that accent Kevin Spacey does
"in all his movies."
What I hate about that accent is
Hollywood has decided that that is a fancy accent.
But I’m gonna let you guys know,
that that is not how accents work.
If you have an accent you just have it.
You can’t just give it to rich people.
[audience laughs]
You don’t like, screw in a monocle and be like,
"I can’t stop talkin’ like this now."
[audience laughs]
"I guess it just comes with the monocle.
"Who knew?
"It did not say on the box when I did it
"that it was gonna do this."
Yeah, you’ll be walking downtown in like, Alabama,
you’re gonna see some guy in front of a gas station like,
"Excuse me sir, can I borrow a dollar
"to go in here and buy some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?"
[audience laughing]
"I don’t mean to be rude,
"I gotta take this call from my brother in the penitentiary."
[audience laughs]
"In the meantime, you can talk to my wife.
"We met down at the, what-cha-call-it,
"Gathering of the Juggalos."
[audience laughs]
Just had a job interview like,
"Good sir, I would love to accept this position
"at Ladies Foot Locker, but
"I definitely cannot pass a drug test."
[audience laughs]
"Will that, or will that not be, a deal breaker?"
[audience laughs]
"Well alright, I will see myself out then."
[audience laughs]
The best thing about Southern accents,
if you look at the history of the Southern accent,
there was a time when the Southeastern
part of the United States
was colonized by the British.
Those are our ancestors.
How did we go from the fanciest accent on Earth
to the living banjo of an accent?
[audience laughs]
That we have today?
How did we go from Duke of Edmonton
to Dukes of Hazzard? I wanna know.
[audience laughs]
I need to know.
If I know anything about the proud Southern people,
I bet we did it intentionally.
Yeah, out of spite for the British.
We just heard we won the Revolutionary War,
we had our guns in the air like, "Boom, boom, boom!"
"We’re never talkin’ like them losers again!"
[audience laughs]
"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom!
"Boom, boom!"
[audience laughs]
One of the generals is just like,
"Yeah, come here, come here,
"your name's Cletus now.
"Come here.
"Fill all our tea with sugar, Cletus.
"They’ll write us letters, they’ll be like,
"That’s not tea,
"we’ll be like, ’it’s sweet tea,
"and it’s all we drink now!"
[audience laughs]
"You write them a letter, take this down Cletus.
"You tell them I said,
"why don’t they go back to where we came from?"
[audience laughs softly]
That is either... the smartest dumb joke
you’re ever gonna hear,
or the dumbest smart joke.
Either way, by the end of it,
it’s only ever for about a fourth of you guys.
[audience laughs]
And people go, "Why do you keep telling it?"
And I go, "Because I get to yell a lot."
If you look it up,
accents typically form within the first six months
you’re on Earth,
based on the people talking around you.
And when I read that fact,
I started cackling with laughter
because you know somebody out there
has faked a sweet, exotic accent for half a year
and ended up with a cool kid with an awesome accent.
[audience laughs]
Somebody out there has done that.
I’m not the smartest person I know,
and I thought of it,
somebody’s done that.
[audience laughs]
I couldn’t do it for two reasons.
First one, perhaps maybe the biggest one,
I don’t have a kid.
And I feel like I wouldn’t
be able to get one for six months
enough to test this.
[audience laughs]
And I feel like when they get him back
my excuse of like, "I just tried to make him sound cool,
"why are you arresting me?"
Or whatever.
I don’t think that’s gonna fly
in a court of law.
The other one is that I am very horrible
at any non-Southern accent.
And I really don’t wanna mess up my kid. Alright?
I don’t want my kid to come up to me
at the age of ten,
finally working up the nerve to ask his old man
that question that's always been on his mind,
you know?
He comes tugging at my shirt sleeve...
"Father?
[audience laughs]
"Father, why... doa talka likea this?
[audience laughs]
"Nobody else in the world talka like this
"but me, father."
[audience laughing]
I don’t even know what I would say to him
in that moment.
I’d probably try to be honest with him
and say something like, uh...
[snorts]
"I figured you were gonna ask me eventually, but...
"Anyway, Daddy was going for Italian."
[audience laughs]
I didn’t really know anybody from Italy, though,
so I kinda just went with Mario.