A few weeks ago Ian gave me some episodes of a TV series I never heard of called Trailer Park Boys. I watched a little of it and started getting hostile.
I didn’t know why. It’s just a low-budget mockumentary comedy, nothing heavy. The language puts me off, I don’t need to be F-bombed every other sentence, but that wasn’t the problem. Why would it bug me? Lighten up, Joel.
I went back and watched a little more and it finally dawned – the show was making fun of me. Not me me, now me, but the clueless uneducated young me who grew up in and around actual trailer parks. It’s all caricatured, of course, but the caricatures aren’t very wide of the mark.
There’s a scene where one of the main characters tells the camera he wants a ‘legal’ job where he isn’t always getting arrested – except he never saw one before and can’t imagine what it would be like. And that reminded me of things that happened in my own family, like my dad telling me I shouldn’t learn his trade because I should get an ‘office job’ instead. He didn’t really know what people did in offices. But he knew they looked cleaner and more comfortable than he was, and so they were probably happier.
Some of the people I grew up around probably aspired to become K-Mart checkers, okay? And yeah, some lived what could generously be called unexamined lives. But making fun of them on this dumb show made me mad. Take my dad, who didn’t know what an ‘office job’ was except that it looked comfortable: He clawed his way to that unionized trade he hated so much. I saw the shithole mid-Michigan farm he was born on, or at least where it used to be. His dad was a dumb, mean white trash SOB who couldn’t string two sentences together. I never really got along with my father very well, but there was no comparison between those two men.
Heh – and I wrote much of the above a few days ago, and put it aside as too trivial and/or personal. Then this morning I was having a conversation with my neighbor J, and happened to mention that deal where somebody wants me to slaughter ten chickens in return for half the meat. And that got him talking about this television show about a bunch of backwoods rednecks in coveralls who make weird swaps and run moonshine…
Sigh. Yes, I’m a stereotype no matter what I do. Go ahead and have a good guffaw.
The thing about the shows you’ve mentioned isn’t the representation, it is the lampooning. These shows are basically a bunch of coastal elites grabbing some stereotypical group of flyover nobodies and making fun of them.
The best part about these shows is that they very often backfire on the network, when the elites find out that the people watching the shows aren’t making fun of the folks they’re watching, they are identifying with them and growing to like them. Look at Duck Dynasty. That show was never intended to be about Americans falling in love with the robertsons. It was supposed to be about Americans making fun of them and lampooning these “new rich” rednecks. Huge backfire on A&E.
As far as your concern about being a stereotype… hell, Joel, we all are. No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to fall under some stereotype or another.
And the Beverly Hillbillies pissed me off ‘cuz it felt like them fancy tv executives was telling viewers to make fun ah mah kin. OTOH, many of those kin WERE dumb rednecks… Probably one of the reasons I tried so hard to lose my accent. Thanks for sharing, Joel,
Guffaw, my ass. That’s good, and if it isn’t anthologizd somewhere then anthologizers are clueless and should be sentenced to double-wides.
Run ’em down and F@#k ’em. Assholes don’t have a life so they have to watch one on TV.
reality leaves the building when the camera makes its appearance. the people headlining these shows are merely acting out the scripted dialogue. and making some big bucks that they likely wouldn’t ever see. shows such as this one and others are why i don’t own a television and only see snippets when i happen to be in the bar that i live over.
goober, you make a good point. we all should be comfortable with who we are and not how others see us at a glance. accept your past cause it’s not going away.
clarence
There ain’t a damn thing wrong with you Joel.
Everything you have, you own and you got it by yourself.
I’m pretty much the same and our up bringing has a lot of similarities.
There is something else we have in common, we know what it’s like to start from scratch.
Some of these people with their nose in the air wouldn’t last a week if they had to start life over with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
I’ve done it more times than I care to admit but I am here to tell ya, I’m a survivor and so are you.
There is nothing wrong with a days pay for a days work in my book either.
I’d take one of you over fifteen of those worthless bastards who like to think they are better than everyone else.
The only thing they are good for is worm food.
Half the meat for butchering ten chickens is a good deal.
you butcher 10 chickens and get to keep 5. You’re looking at close to 20$ for an hours worth of work plus all the offal ypur dogs can eat. Doesn’t seem like a backwards redneck deal to me. Hell you can make one of those plucking tubs and go into business butchering for easily disturbed suburbanites.
http://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/3-3/affordable-homemade-poultry-plucker/
Dude, you as much as anybody should know that who you are is not where you live.