I’m exhausted, but might I recommend this delightful essay about why the South inspires particularly ludicrous comedy such as The Righteous Gemstones:
The fact of the matter is that the south is funny because it’s ridiculous. Like, I can’t remember the exact details of the whole thing, but my neighbor growing up definitely went to jail for being involved in an organized ring of tractor thieves. One friend’s dad was a former professional drag racer whose compound included an airplane hangar, a forklift, a single-wide trailer, and a giant yard that occasionally doubled as a mud pit where people would race beater cars while crashing into each other. (I once rode shotgun as his twelve-year-old son zoomed around in one of these races; it was fantastic.)
Another friend had an unfortunate habit of waking up early to go hunting and then forgetting to take his gun out of his truck before he got to school, which I’m pretty sure is a felony; years later, he became a wildlife officer and briefly went viral after someone posted a video of him wrestling a deer to the ground in order to safely remove it from a thrift store. And then a couple years ago, a series of unsolved horse deaths prompted many in the local equestrian community to worry that there was a horse serial killer on the loose. (Local police ended up concluding that the killers were likely feral hogs, but that doesn’t explain how one of the horses died from a bullet wound.)
Accismus 