Jeff Foxworthy coming to the Albany Municipal Auditorium

ALBANY — Comedy superstar Jeff Foxworthy will team with local boutique marketing agency Chatterbox for an evening of laughs at the Albany Municipal Auditorium on March 19 to benefit storm victims.

According to both Foxworthy and Chatterbox, all of the proceeds from the show will be donated, via Mission:Change, to victims of the January storms that devastated much of the city.

Foxworthy, who is currently on tour with Larry the Cable Guy, took time Thursday to talk with The Albany Herald about comedy, his life and the upcoming benefit show.

ALBANY HERALD: Mr. Foxworthy, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

JEFF FOXWORTHY: It’s Jeff. Mr. Foxworthy is my granddaddy. Calling me that is too much pressure. It implies that I have to act like an adult, and I’m not ready for that.

AH: OK, Jeff, can you tell me a little bit about your upcoming storm benefit performance at the Albany Municipal Auditorium, how it came to be and how you are connected to Albany?

JF: Yeah, well, how I came to do it is that one of my best friends, Robert Peacock, is from Albany. We both started out as comedians in Atlanta, and then I added him as a writer when I started doing a sitcom out in L.A. Now, he’s been writing for about 30 years out there, but he’s from Albany and he called me and told me that there were people who really needed help there. So I told him to find a place and find a date, and I will come do a show. I told him we’ll give them every dime; I won’t charge a penny. I am excited about it. You know I have a farm not too far up the road. It’s near Callaway Gardens. So if I’m not working, I am usually on a tractor on the farm. I like smaller towns like Albany and the people. I blend in much better there than I do in Atlanta. Also, I have always known people from Albany and always liked it. We didn’t have any idea in Atlanta how bad the devastation was from the storms, but when Robert told me people were hurting I said, “Find a theater and find a date.”

AH: You know, I missed an opportunity to meet you one time. I couldn’t go, but my wife went to a U2 concert in Atlanta during 2009 and she came back with a photo with you and one with Brooke Shields.

JF: You were probably jealous of the Brooke Shields part more than me (laughing).

AH: Are you a big U2 fan?

JF: Well, my daughter has always been a U2 fan, and so the day tickets went on sale I got her tickets. She actually started as a teenager raising money for malaria nets for kids in Africa and started a little website for it, fundraising stuff for it and partnered with Compassion International. They ended up raising about $5 million for malaria nets. So when we were at the show, during the pre-show thing, a lady came over, tapped me on the shoulder and said (band lead singer) Bono wants to meet Jordan — not Bono wants to meet Jeff, but he wants to meet my daughter. She was so cool. She was able to have a conversation with him, and I’m just sitting there with urine slowly rolling down the inside of my pants leg. I couldn’t even talk.

AH: Well, that was a little ego check for you.

JF: For real, Bono doesn’t want to meet you, he wants to meet your daughter.

AH: With the March 19 show, what can people expect? Will you be performing any new material?

JF: Oh, yeah, I’ve always got new jokes. You know, I am on tour with Larry the Cable Guy right now, and so we both, before we even started this tour, said we’ve got to do all-new stuff. The only way to do it is to go all the way back to the little-bitty comedy clubs with no cards in your hands and figure out is this funny or is this funny. It’s a lot of work. That’s the weird thing about being a comedian. Any other job that you’ve had done for 30 years, you would know what works and what doesn’t work. You know, if you laid carpet, you’d know this works and this doesn’t. If you’d been with me before I went onstage on a Tuesday night in front of 30 people and you said “Pick the four jokes that you think are going to work the best,” I would have been dead wrong on two of them. But the audience is always right. I just trust that they’re right. So I have spent months and months writing new stuff. In fact, I’m writing new stuff right now. So there may be one or two things they may have seen, but most of it will be all new stuff.

AH: How did you make the jump into comedy? From what I read about you, you actually started off life, after attending Georgia Tech, working for IBM.

JF: Yeah, well, probably like a lot of folks, I had no idea what to do in life, but my dad worked for IBM and one of his buddies got me a job, originally in dispatch. It sounds more impressive than it actually was. I carried a tool bag and I fixed machines, but I was really the guy at work doing impersonations of the boss in the break room where everybody’s laughing until the boss walks in. So they probably would have fired me a long time ago if I had stayed, but some guys I worked with always went to the Punchline, a comedy club in Atlanta, and they entered me in a contest. Not like an amateur night thing, but a contest for working comedians. They came back and told me that they had entered me in this contest, and I thought “For God’s sake, I have never even been in a comedy club.” So I went and watched for about a week and figured out, OK, that’s how you do it. Then I went home and wrote material about my family, and I won the contest the first night I ever went on stage. I was so nervous, I couldn’t even look at people, but I knew the first night I did it that this is what I want to do. So I did amateur nights for several months, and then I quit my job.

AH: So you turned in your tool bag?

JF: Yeah, I turned in my tool bag. I still remember my mother staring at me and asking, “Are you on the dope?”

AH: She actually asked you if you were on “the” dope?

JF: Yeah, not even dope, but “the” dope. “Are you doing the dope, Jeff?” Five years later, I was on Johnny Carson and that same mother is telling me, “You know, you wasted all those years at IBM.” For crying out loud.

AH: Tell me about the current tour that you are on.

JF: Well, it’s called the “We’ve Been Thinking Tour,” because when Larry and I are on the road together we sit around all day together and go, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about so and so.” Then we sit there and start laughing and talking about it and it kinds of ends up being a bit. So I tell the audience, when we start thinking about stuff, if we didn’t have them, we would be on the psychiatrist’s couch somewhere. And you know, I think I have always been lucky as a comic, because I just realized early in life that you can’t sit around and go “What’s funny, what’s funny?” I just always assume that if I think it, or if my wife says it, or my family does it, surely other people are doing the same thing. So to me, the greatest compliment at the end of the night is when people come back and say, “My God, you have been in our house.” You realize then that you are kind of taking their life, showing it to them and they are laughing at themselves. They’re not laughing at me, they’re laughing at themselves. You’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. It’s the release valve that keeps the boiler from exploding. Everybody’s going through some kind of struggle, so if somebody tells me that they can’t remember the last time they laughed that much, it is a good thing. For those two hours, you don’t have any problems.

AH: Does Larry ever wear sleeves or does he just torture you with the biceps all the time?

JF: Oh, God, he tortures me constantly, and they are not getting prettier as the years go by, I can tell you that for a fact. Probably the moment that it really hit me that Larry never wears sleeves was when we had to do a thing at the White House, and they said you had to wear a tux. So Goober went and bought a tux and then he is sitting there with pinking shears on the bus, cutting the sleeves off of it. I was just sitting there thinking, “You just paid $1,000 for that.” Larry is like the fair: After five minutes you will feel better about your own family. Lord, have mercy.

AH: So, when I was researching some info before talking to you, I did see where you did not make the list of the 35 manliest mustaches. Do you feel bad about that?

JF: How could I have not made the list?

AH: I, personally, felt like you were a shoo-in. Maybe hoping to do better than Sam Elliot or Tom Selleck would have been hoping for a little too much, but I felt like you could have definitely beat out Alex Trebek.

JF: No! I did not lose out to Alex Trebek!

AH: You totally did. He was like No. 4 on the list.

JF: His mustache is not even manly; it’s like a little caterpillar. I got robbed. I mean, I got like the Dale Earnhart II mustache. I mean, I’m not going to say that I should overtake Sam Elliot, but I got Alex Trebek beat. I will meet him in a parking lot for that. I mean it’s been on my lip since the 11th grade. You know, my wife has never seen me without a mustache. Funny enough, Sam Elliot was the inspiration from “Lifeguard.” I was totally that guy that had a mustache in the 11th grade. I don’t even know if I have a lip anymore. It could just be run away nose hairs at this point.

AH: Do you plan on spending any time in Albany prior to or after the show?

JF: I will probably come down the day before. It is kind of the busy time of year for me, but I will come down to the farm and then meet Robert and his wife and come down and spend a couple of days in Albany and do the show. But then I got to get back on the road. I was happy that we were able to find a date that works. The only thing I said to them there was that I would pick any date, I’ll do it now or during the summer, but March 19 was kind of rushing it. So I just want to make sure we fill this place up. Hopefully, if I’m going to give away my night and drive from Atlanta down to Albany, then folks that are in shape to help somebody else will come out and laugh for two hours and we can help people.

Foxworthy will be at the Albany Municipal Auditorium March 19. Local musicians Anne Cline and the Evergreen Family Band are the opening acts. Tickets are $45-$75 and are available through Ticketmaster outlets or at the Albany Civic Center Box Office. For VIP or corporate tickets, contact Amy Rolfe at (229) 343-3029. Doors open at 5 p.m. The show starts at 6 p.m.