| Due South: Blount, Bailey craft good ol' humor 04/11/2001 By Jerome Weeks / The Dallas Morning News As an unrepentant Northerner, I admit I remain mystified as to the supposed comic appeal of Jim Nabors or Don Knotts.
Even as a child, I used to wonder why Mr. Knotts simply didn't explode and get it the heck over with. His fingers and other body parts would lie scattered, still twitching, and we would all just get past that particular ticking time-bomb performance to what surely must be all the actual funny bits the show's writers had been saving up. Mr. Knotts looked close sometimes, but of course, I remained as frustrated as the writers.
So it was a thoroughly pleasant surprise during the early '80s to encounter Roy Blount Jr. and find in his book Crackers an engaging, thoughtful and often hilarious introduction to Southern humor. Crackers, Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor and Be Sweet, his 1998 memoir, remain his best books, and the high points of his appearance Tuesday at the Dallas Museum of Art for Arts & Letters Live were the passages he read from Be Sweet.
At his best, Mr. Blount is capable of telling an amusing anecdote about his grandson while simultaneously outlining the nature of yarn spinning and passing along a touching insight about human need or his own failings. His finest work has been marked by such multilevel self-consciousness – hence, the political- historical digressions, the constant backing up in order to get things in perspective, to explain himself. It's a self-consciousness that has not prevented him from a) making sense, b) relating well-made stories and c) being a clever, charming yuckmeister. Mr. Blount was into sly, self-defeating footnotes long before David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), but who gets the credit?
In something of an analogous fashion, Bailey White, Mr. Blount's comic partner for the evening of readings, became known in the '90s as National Public Radio's token Southern voice – a froggy, quietly deadpan voice that seemed intended to attract and/or placate Dixie listeners while not baffling unrepentant Northerners. Uncontentious and Mayberry-modest, Ms. White led me to assume mistakenly she must be in her 70s – an Aunt Bea with some brains – and her popular appeal shot right past me.
But Ms. White's finest work isn't in those nostalgic radio postcards she sends from the land of languid eccentrics. In a longer piece – such as "Computer School," the story she read about a boring night class that logically led to breaking and entering and betting at the dog track – she can achieve a perfectly crafted, delightfully satisfying comic set piece, a story so good that Mr. Blount said it made him want to edit another humor anthology just to include it.
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