I know, you think this is going to be a facetious posting, but, honestly, it’s not. Foxworthy hosted the “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?”-themed lunch during Fox’s TCA days…an event which found us critics receiving school kits, bags of Foxworthy’s beef jerky, school lunch trays bearing the show’s logo, and an inflatable globe…and I don’t think it would’ve been humanly possible for him to come off as a nicer, more genuine guy.
One of the writers asked Foxworthy what he thought about teachers utilizing the show as almost an instructional aid of sorts, and you could tell his answer was based not on what anyone else had suggested he should say if the question came up, but, rather, straight from the heart.
“You know what?” he began. “I think (teaching) is probably one of the most difficult jobs in the country and probably one of the most underpaid and appreciated. I expected, when I started doing this show, to get more mail from kids. I mean, there were kids who obviously didn’t know me as a comedian or know the ‘Blue Collar’ stuff. I have been amazed — and I see it in the mail every week that I get from teachers, over and over again – at teachers saying, ‘You have made it cool to be smart again.’ And they record the show and they take it into the classroom and they show the show and the kids are interested in it and they use it as a learning tool. So that was a byproduct of it that I didn’t even foresee when I started it. But to me, that’s one of the coolest elements, personally, away from the stage, that it has made it cool to be smart. You’re not made fun of for being a nerd. It shows kids going on TV and beating adults at something, and it’s with their brains. So, you know, hopefully, maybe this elevates education and how we deal with it as a priority in this country.”
Foxworthy is also very, very aware of the fact that the kids on his show are, indeed, kids first and foremost, and that something as inevitable as having them provide a wrong answer to a contestant on the show might well really upset them. “There’s always the risk of that,” he admits. “They’re not only kids, they’re humans, so they’re fallible. We were filming two days ago, and Cody was at the podium, and the guy decided to copy Cody’s paper, and Cody was wrong. And I looked over, and I thought Cody was going to cry. Well, if I had been standing where Cody was, I would have felt the same way that he did. But it’s like, I went back over to the classroom, I took Cody, and I said, ‘All right, come over here and look at the rest of the answers. Two of your classmates didn’t know the answer to that, too. So you shouldn’t feel bad about that.’
“It’s more important for me to be a good dad than it is to be a good comedian or a good actor or a good game show host,” continued Foxworthy, “and I have proven (it). I’ve turned down movies for the past three summers because I don’t want to give a summer away with my kids. I’ve always been very concerned about having kids on TV. It’s always made me feel very weird. When I did (‘The Jeff Foxworthy Show’), Haley Joel Osment’s dad came and spent the day with me, and he said, ‘I really want to know what you’re about before I even allow my kid to come to work here.” So it’s always been a little bit of a weird thing for me with kids doing this. I love the fact that these kids this year, none of them have aspirations to be an actor. They’re just there because they like being smart and being funny. We have strict guidelines about how long they can work, when they have to take a break. If I have to err on one side of this, it’s always in their favor because, more than anything else, I want them to be kids. And the great thing about this, it’s not strung out over nine months like a sitcom or a drama is. We’ve shot two and a half weeks, we’ll shoot another week in August, and we’re done, so they get to have the rest of their year to go to their regular school and to grow up and be regular kids.”
Okay, sorry, those were big quotes, and it’s probably just because I’m really feeling my inner dad-ness today, but I just walked away from this panel thinking that Jeff Foxworthy is the kind of guy you wish every single celebrity could be, and I wanted to share that.
