COMEDY REVIEW : Foxworthy Spreads Out His Laughs to Everyone

Jeff Foxworthy’s appearance at a packed Wiltern Theatre Saturday dispelled any suspicion that he might be a one-trick pony who specializes in one of the most worn categories of the stand-up repertoire: the goober joke.

A lot of the stuff that makes up his “You’re a Redneck If . . . “ may owe its atmospheric popularity to our multicultural era of the hair-trigger ethnic and sexual temper, where it seems nobody can laugh at anybody without inviting a letter of censure, or even the threat of a lawsuit, from some seething advocacy group.

Now you have to wonder, watching those lurid daytime TV talk shows and observing the similarity among overweight guests with strange hair and teeth, if a new generic figure isn’t beginning to emerge for everyone else to gang up on: the person who has no shopping option but Piggly-Wiggly, or the person, as Foxworthy jokes, “whose family tree doesn’t fork.”

But there’s a subtle difference between cruel stereotype and affecting caricature that resides in fondness for the thing observed. The healthiest humor is based on bemused recognition that quickly finds its way back to one’s self.

In his good-ol’-boy Georgia accent, the 36-year-old Foxworthy brings up the list of redneck categories (“You’re a redneck if your mother’s hair gets caught in the ceiling fan”) that has elevated his comedy CD to No. 12 on the Billboard chart.

But it’s a short list in a large program that eventually includes everyone who has been single (meaning, as a rule, poor--where you hope that couch someone threw out on the sidewalk will still be there after dark, so that you can take it home and put it in your living room next to the road cone) or married or a parent or a child or a grandchild.

If the categories are all-encompassingly broad (though they settle on the working class), Fox-worthy fills them in with an exceptionally gifted eye for the telling detail.

Like the ebullient young Andy Griffith, Foxworthy seems a natural. He has all the tools of a terrific comedian: sustained material, presence, energy, rhythm, surprise, multiple payoffs, and the inescapable observation. A desperate laugh of surrender erupted in a roar from the men in his audience when he caught the way they lie to their wives, and each other, on their boys’ night out. He has a lot to say about women too, but he manages to point out how they generally do a better job of things, without patronizing them.