Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor

Rate this book
There may be no funnier species in the literary universe than a Southern writer on a roll. The richest vein of American humor―the broadest, the earthiest, the most outrageously inventive―can be found below the Mason-Dixon line, where the comic impulse just naturally seems allied to the native storytelling genius, and the sacred and the profane are on the closest of terms.

Roy Blount, Jr., himself a native Southerner and on paper and in person one of the funniest men in America, has dug deep and foraged far and wide to produce the definitive treasury of Southern humor for our time. It comprises more than 150 selections, including stories, sketches, essays, poems, memoirs, and blues and C&W lyrics, arranged under such headings as "My People, My People (How's Your Mama 'n Them?)," "Here Be Dragons, or, How Come These Butterbeans Have an Alligator Taste?" and "Lying and Other Forms of Communication." The wildly heterogeneous roster of contributors range from such classics as William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty to such brilliantly funny contemporaries as Molly Ivins, Dave Barry, Harry Crews, Ishmael Reed, Barry Hannah, Bailey White, and Roy Blount, Jr., his very own self.

If you could stop laughing long enough you'd probably call Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor a classic. And you'd be right.

670 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1994

Loading interface...
Loading interface...

About the author

Roy Blount Jr.

74 books61 followers
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.

In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
26 (31%)
4 stars
26 (31%)
3 stars
21 (25%)
2 stars
6 (7%)
1 star
3 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Bill.
1 review
Currently reading
May 27, 2012
Blount has truly done as fine a job of editing as he does of entertaining, and of getting to the heart of a subject. But my first perusal of this work left me with a couple of questions I have not been able to answer. First, in what part of the South would I find Minnisota? And, more importantly, how did Blount complile such a volume and leave out Lewis Grizzard? Garrison Keillor (who I love) is in but Grizzard is not? I've searched for aticles in which the two are named, thinking I might find some indication of a rivaly like a Mozart v. Solieri, but I cannot find a thing past one account where Blount accepted an award for Grizzard. So somebody please tell me if everyone else in the South knows about some event which happened and drove a wedge between these two icons when I was in the Air Force serving up Nawth in Illinois and isn't discussed in polite company. If such happened, my guess is it would have happened in a men's room during half-time of a Georgia-Auburn football game in Athens.
Profile Image for Jeff Wilder.
6 reviews3 followers
March 27, 2014
If you're thinking this is full of redneck humor, you're wrong. Drawing on both old and new humor, Blount creates an anthology of that's both cerebral and earthy. Some of the choices might seem odd and some writers might be over-represented. But on the whole, this is a fantastic collection. However, I'd advise strongly against reading it cover to cover. Since I bought it years ago after finding it on sale for about $5.00 at Barnes And Noble, I tend to go through and pick and choose based on what I'm in the mood for. That's the best way to read a collection of this type. Reading it cover to cover kills the laughs after a while.
3,900 reviews81 followers
December 4, 2018
Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor by Roy Blount Jr. (Editor) (W.W. Norton & Co. 1994)(817) is a collection of essays, short stories, song lyrics, and poems from the editor's favorite Southern humorists. My favorite writers which were included are Bailey White, Ferrol Sams, Jerry Clower, Garrison Keillor, O. Henry ("The Ransom of Red Chief"), and John Prine(!). My rating: 7.5/10, finished 6/25/12. I purchased my HB copy at McKay's for $3.00 on 12/4/18. HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
391 reviews
July 8, 2017
Face it. Yankees aren't as funny. (Though Yankee politics and lack of religion are superior!) The best humorists come from below the Mason-Dixon Line. In this anthology, Blount has collected more than 150 stories, sketches, poems, essays, blues, country and rock lyrics. He collects Twain, Faulkner, Welty, Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Molly Ivins, Dave Barry. Blount's own contribution: "I Don't Eat Dirt Personally." I checked out a library copy and desire to buy my own now that I remember this book.
Profile Image for Whiskey Tango.
1,099 reviews4 followers
Read
July 24, 2019
Face it. Yankees aren't as funny. (Though Yankee politics and lack of religion are superior!) The best humorists come from below the Mason-Dixon Line. In this anthology, Blount has collected more than 150 stories, sketches, poems, essays, blues, country and rock lyrics. He collects Twain, Faulkner, Welty, Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Molly Ivins, Dave Barry. Blount's own contribution: "I Don't Eat Dirt Personally." I checked out a library copy and desire to buy my own now that I remember this book.
Profile Image for Paige.
68 reviews21 followers
November 13, 2007
One of my favorite anthologies of all time. Not only does it have all the greats -- Faulkner, Twain, O'Connor, Welty -- there's also Molly Ivins, Russell Baker, Bailey White, Jerry Clower...

Best of all, though, is the introduction, a laugh-out-loud essay that makes me giggle just thinking about it.
Profile Image for Greg.
724 reviews16 followers
June 27, 2007
An essential collection if you like The Funny. Blount's intro is brilliant (esp. the Zen koans) and the stuff he's collected (lyrics, short stories, memoirs) from such disparate sources is uniformly brilliant.
Profile Image for Mary.
6 reviews5 followers
January 4, 2008
Read this book and you will laugh until you fall off the sofa.
Then you'll just lie there, laughing on the floor.
Profile Image for Robert C..
Author 6 books18 followers
July 15, 2018
This is anthology, so of course the "Star" rating must be a bit up-and-down. Roy Blount's introductions to his selected authors are uniformly interesting and enjoyable, often funny. The selections he has made have made me laugh out loud often. I have even bought a couple of books from the authors he's introduced me to - Nikki Giovanni, notably - and who knew that Flannery O'Connor could be so funny writing about her peacocks? This is a book to put somewhere that you can pick it up from time to time and read for 5-10 minutes at a whack (well, okay, the Enamel Library is probably best - though my copy recently gravitated to the kitchen counter where I eat breakfast and lunch and snacks standing up in violation of all my mother's scoldings.)
Profile Image for Elizabeth.
677 reviews
February 8, 2012
I love Roy Blount, Jr and was excited to read this. I'll admit I didn't even read all the stories. They are all well written and this is a great anthology, but just not interesting to me. I loved the ones that Blount wrote, though. He's such a funny guy.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.