Jeff Foxworthy is clearly a flippin’ genius. He’s parlayed
the whole “You might be a redneck if…” thing into a cottage empire, with books,
comedy CDs and the hugely successful Blue
Collar Comedy Tour special, which in turn spawned its own movie. Because my
TiVo is under strict instructions never to pull anything from CMT, however, I
didn’t realize that he’d also taken up someone on a dare by launching a
Southern-fried In Living Color sketch
comedy show. That’s essentially what Foxworthy’s
Big Night Out is, and it’s apparently fairly popular, at that. Making its
DVD bow on a well-produced two-disc set that includes all of the series’
episodes, as well as bloopers, behind-the-scenes footage and more, Big Night Out is — within the confines
of its demographic pandering, and against almost every instinct in my body — a
mostly winning collection of laughs and musical performances.

The series premiered its 12-episode run on CMT in September of
last year, with each half-hour show — taped in front of a live studio audience
in Atlanta’s Alliance Theater — finding
Foxworthy joined onstage by some of country music’s biggest stars. Individuals
and acts like Trace Adkins, Sara Evans, Pat Green, Jack Ingram, Montgomery
Gentry, Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams Jr., Joe Nichols, Blake Shelton, The Warren
Brothers, The Wreckers and Billy Currington all test their comedic talents by
appearing in sketches with Foxworthy and his regular troupe of actors,
consisting of Brooke Dillman, Peter Oldring, Shane Caldwell and Sara Erikson. (Hypnotist
Mark Sweet and comic Kathleen Madigan also make special appearances.) Clearly
the humor hews to the good-natured and countrified; Foxworthy opens each show
with a monologue, where he riffs on road rage, the guitar solo in “Freebird”
and paranoia over one’s health (joking here about his wife disallowing him from
watching “any programs subtitled ‘The Silent Killer’”). He also summarizes the emergence
of Viagra thusly: “Used to be when you were done playing you just went out and
started a garden.”

These genial openings are fine and well, but where Big Night Out scores surprisingly well
is in its skits. A Celebrity Deer Hunter
sketch finds guest star Sara Evans battling for promotional time with two self-touting
hosts and their six-barrel shotgun (“Because aiming is for sissies!”), and there’s
also an amusing segment in which a group of guys organize an intervention to curb
their whipped pal’s devotion to his wife, all because it’s further making them look
bad. One of the best sketches, though, inverts the stereotype of the hooting construction
worker; here, girls holler at and lust for men’s pot bellies, deriding the one buff
male who walks by as underfed. The lamest bits, meanwhile, incorporate audience
questions at show’s end; this bit of back-slapping is unnecessary, and often
painful to watch.

Spread out over two discs, Big Night Out is presented in full screen, with a Dolby digital
stereo track that captures the set’s meager aural demands just fine. A nice
collection of bloopers, pared-down offerings of the best of Foxworthy’s
monologues and a few congratulatory behind-the-scenes featurettes comprise the
slate of bonus material, making for a solid offering that plays across
generational (if not always state) lines. B (Show) B+ (Disc)