Andi Marie Tillman
Origin: Huntsville, Tennessee
Andi Marie Tillman is a haunted house. When the comedian transforms into now-signature characters—an ornery papaw, a chain-smoking aunt, a Fellowship Hall gossip—she’s simply dialing into the spirits within her. “I have pictures of my dead relatives up all over my house,” says the Nashville resident, who is thirty-five. “Sometimes I’ll pass one and ask, ‘Aunt Marie, what do you think I should do about this?’” That’s how the languid-tongued humorist is able to craft the Appalachia-tinged sketches that strike such a chord with her social media followers and subscribers, now 1.7 million strong. “They’re very much inspired by an energy force that I’ve collected through the people in my life.” Early this year, her colorful, quirky online take on the world “down South” will transfer to the stage, when Tillman premieres her first one-woman show.
→ Funniest Southern phrase: “‘Plumb,’ because it really confuses the ‘outsiders’ when you say plumb before anything: ‘I’m plumb tired. I was plumb wore out.’ Then, I love a good ‘might could’…If you get a ‘might could’ from me, just expect that two hours later you’re going to hear I came down with a migraine.”
Who’s Who in Tillman’s Appalachia
From left, in the photo above:
1. Pam, Your Aunt Who…: Anyone who grew up in the church will recognize Pam, the aunt with wild makeup who gives out gum and whispers gossip (even though she “don’t like talkin’ bad about people…but”) while her “Pennycostal” minister rails against Muppets and vaping.
2. Bethany Samuel: For “a mere two hundred thousand dollars—or two stones that you produce from your own body,” you can join the Stones of Remembrance retreat planned by Bethany, a spiritualist who garbles the gospel with New Age woo-woo and crystals from Natural Wonders.
3. Papaw, the Piddler: You’ll most likely find Papaw in his yard with his chickens, “just kinda piddlin’ around, waitin’ to die,” or up at the Hardee’s with his buddies. Here’s Papaw greeting aliens: “I tell you what. Yuns went and tore up all my gravel with whatever yuh putterin’ around in.”
4. Andi Herself: Tillman tags herself as “the Appalachian lady that does the characters,” but she’s also a Halloween fanatic (check out her horror shortsYou’ve Got Hell, starring her vampire “Nashveratu,” andHome Cooked Horror: There’s a Secret in Them Soup Beans).
5. Patsy, the Receptionist: There is a Patsy at “every clerk’s office in the South,” sucking on her Life Savers mints, asking about yuh mama an’ ’em, and lulling you with the ASMR clack of her keyboard. As one fan put it in an Instagram comment, “Patsy is why I pay my property taxes in person rather than online.” —Alli Patton
Heather McMahan
Origin: Atlanta, Georgia
“Through pain comes prosperity.” Or so Heather McMahan said after she scalded her nether regions (“burnt my grundle”) with Starbucks coffee, as memorably recounted on her podcast, Absolutely Not. She should know. After the sudden death of her father from cancer in 2015, the comedian moved back in with her mom in Atlanta and, as anyone might do, took to social media to air her grief. But because she’s laugh-till-you-pee funny, she amassed a following (approaching a million across social channels) and got the break that had eluded her over years in L.A. and New York.
Now with three major stand-up tours, Netflix and Hulu TV specials, and multiple red-carpet hosting gigs to her name, McMahan, who is thirty-eight, still lives in her childhood home and pops up at tailgates at her alma mater, Ole Miss. (“My latest hyperfixation,” she says, “is the amount of caviar I’ve seen in the Grove.”) And for her current routine, she’s leaning in to political pain. “There’s this idea that Southern women are buttoned up and clutching their pearls. My job is to say onstage what we’re saying when we’re playing mah-jongg and drinking white wine all night.”
→Funniest Southern phrase: “‘Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.’ I say it in all respects. I get my yearly Pap smear, and I look at my doctor and I’m like, ‘Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, we’re going to be okay.’” —Elizabeth Florio
Roy Wood Jr.
Origin: Birmingham, Alabama
Roy Wood Jr. doesn’t get back to Alabama as much as he used to. Fatherhood and a busy schedule of writing, acting, and hosting CNN’s Have I Got News for You have made that trickier, but the beloved former Daily Show correspondent, who’s now forty-seven, has never forgotten the lessons he learned growing up in Birmingham, many of which he’s woven into his recent memoir, The Man of Many Fathers. Two of the most important: That, despite what they might think, people are more alike than they are different, which he learned from years of doing stand-up, and that humor is the salve they often apply to their deepest wounds. (He learned that from the goths, rebels, and sex workers he met working at Subway.)
The key to Southern comedy, Wood believes, is mastering the art of the inside joke. “You either know about mosquito trucks coming down the street, or you don’t,” he says. “You either know about drinking sun tea on the porch, or you don’t. And if you don’t know, it’s not our job to explain it to you.”
→Funniest thing about the South: “Waffle House is where we all come to be peaceful…or where we all go to start a war.” —Bronwen Dickey
Brandi Denise
Origin: Hilliard, Florida
When Brandi Denise was around ten, she mail-ordered a CD of Adam Sandler’s parody songs and began writing her own. She didn’t imagine then that as an adult she would meet Sandler—or that she’d go on to hone her humor chops at Chicago’s legendary Second City improv lab, deliver a set on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, or nail a recurring role on the 50 Cent–produced Power and a guest spot on Abbott Elementary. That trajectory launched after Denise—born in Texas and raised in Florida—began performing stand-up after graduating from Florida A&M, while toiling at (and gleaning material from) her job as a social worker. Much of her routine these days centers around the wild worlds of sex and dating, and “comes off a little City Girls–ish,” she says, referring to the ribald former Miami hip-hop duo. But she can shift gears smoothly, say, joshing about the moment when racial justice became all the rage: She had a dream, she relates in one bit, in which she chased after a fictional niece and nephew named Justice and Peace in a courthouse. Activists echoed the iconic protest words when she would scream at the kids, “No, Justice! No, Peace!”
→Why live comedy matters: “The live experience is so much more authentic, more organic. You can’t see that through a phone. AI is trying to take us down!” —Cynthia R. Greenlee
Rory Scovel
Origin: Greenville, South Carolina
Rory Scovel created a stage persona early in his stand-up career: “Steve Spurrier mixed with my dad and my uncle.” It helped that his family in Greenville was just as funny as the Ol’ Ball Coach. Making his kin laugh was the drug that launched everything that has come after: four stand-up specials (most recently Religion, Sex, and a Few Things In Between, on HBO Max) and regular acting gigs in movies and on TV.
Scovel, who’s forty-five and now based in Denver, kicked off last year by doing a run of ten improvised shows in New York City. Those sets helped generate material for his current Know Your Enemy Tour, which runs through April. Who’s the enemy? That’s revealed in the show, but the title is also about “people having such a willingness to be told who our enemies are, as opposed to finding out, genuinely, who might actually be someone who’s not on your team,” he says. “The punch line is kind of the percussion and the rhythm of a set. But I think the more you do this, and the more you age into a job like this, you start to take liberties with some of those longer pauses.”
→On Southern accent code-switching: “I love and cherish and have so much pride for the Southern accent. I think that’s why it comes out onstage, because it feels like the only place I’m allowed to do it and not seem like I’m fake.” —TT
Mike Goodwin
Origin: Camden, South Carolina
He doesn’t cuss, rocks bow ties and quarter zips straight from a bougie uncle’s closet, and performed his first stand-up gig at his church’s New Year’s service. Since then, Mike Goodwin, a fifty-year-old resident of Columbia, South Carolina, army veteran, and father of two, has become an in-demand “clean” funnyman, an affable paterfamilias who brings to the stage accessible stories of parenting, domestic life, and aging. He ruefully laments midlife, when a routine micromovement can result in a pulled muscle. Goodwin disabuses his son of his healthy “it’s not about winning” ethos when it comes to sports. “Oh, no,” he tells the boy. After paying for all the athletic fees and gear, “I need to see some wins.”
Goodwin says he gets his humor from his Camden childhood, when he was a wiry “knucklehead” whose glasses would slip down his nose during basketball games. He’d wisecrack to disarm bullies and defuse tensions at home. Today his routine conveys that the personal and the aesthetic are political, even as he eschews hard-nosed finger-pointing. One of his reliable jokes recounts the time he and his wife went on a home tour in Columbia. He pointed at the window treatments: “What’s that?” The reply: “plantation blinds.” “No, we’re not doing that,” he quips. Plantations “didn’t work so well for us the first time.”
→Why Southerners are funnier: “Comedy is highlighting inconsistencies in the world,” Goodwin says. “And I don’t know if there’s a place with more inconsistencies than the South.” —CRG
Want more laughs? Find more stories from our comedy issue:
>> Behind the Curtain of Nate Bargatze’s Comedy Empire
>> Five Comedy Clubs to Seek Out
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book. All books are independently selected by the G&G editorial team.
