Redneck and Blue Collar Comedy

Abstract

Fhis chapter explains how, through carnivalesque inversion, a Confederate flag-waving redneck scapegoat, “Larry the Cable Guy,” is deployed to redeem and recenter blue collar “white guys,” who have been ostensibly “stiffed,” as Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi¹ puts it, by so-called political correctness. While bearing the sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and homophobic social sins of the past, the redneck scapegoat leads the carnivalesque centering of Blue Collar “white guys,” the reassertion of traditional gender roles, the positioning of black males in the background of white male action, the stigmatization of white poverty, and the name-calling ridicule of an array of people, including gays, lesbians, and political liberals, the alleged (un-American) promoters of so-called political correctness. The chapter concludes with a critique of how the multifaceted ideotype Redneck and Blue Collar Comedy, like other formulations of Poor Chic, also constitutes a weapon of mass distraction. In this case it works by actively discouraging (liberal) “political” thinking and by diverting attention away from disenfranchising material realities: the devastation of the US manufacturing base via outsourcing of jobs overseas, or the impending demise of the form of economic infrastructure that blue collar men have historically depended on for their sustenance.