Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you ever get into Dr. Phil’s ridiculous Southern or Texas sayings? Like, “We got a lady here, and she’s been pissing in a bucket with a hole in it”?

Rick Rosner: I like to talk rural. I mean, I don’t necessarily use the sayings like “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but I’ll lean into rural dialect—especially if there’s a movie where the characters are talking that way.

And there are different kinds of rural. I remember Patton Oswalt did a bit once—comedians go on the road for years and hit hundreds of towns. He did, like, four dozen different regional accents. It was incredible.

You’ve got the twangy Southern accent, like the old prospector—high-pitched, nasal, exaggerated. Then you’ve got the smoother kind, like Lindsey Graham—more of that dulcet, genteel tone of the Southern gentleman. 

I used to talk rural when I was bouncing at bars. It was a way to telegraph that I was kind of a local schmuck—not someone who was going to bend the rules for anyone. Using a flat, accent-neutral American voice gave customers the impression that they were talking to someone professional, maybe even reasonable.

Jacobsen: So the accent became part of the social signalling?

Rosner: It was a tool—just like AI, in a way. It depends on how you use it. When I talked rural, it kind of signalled that I was probably a bit of a dick. I was intentionally lowering people’s expectations. I couldn’t do what they wanted most of the time, but I still did my job right.

And sometimes—when I was, like, 22 and dumb—I’d talk “gay” just because I thought it was funny to have a door guy sounding like a fanboy.

Jacobsen: That sort of exaggerated, performative contrast?

Rosner: Yeah. I was being a jerk, but I found it hilarious then. Still, I’ll talk country sometimes. Carole gets mad at me when I do it.

Jacobsen: What does it sound like?

Rosner: Just a light country effect—dropping final “g” s, speaking in a drawl, lots of apostrophes in the transcript if you wrote it down. It is not deep South but more like “countrified casual.”

Jacobsen: I saw this bit with Christina P—the comedian married to Tom Segura. They’ve got a podcast together. 

Rosner: I don’t know him well, but I know of him. 

Jacobsen: They brought on this guy in his mid-40s, Southern-sounding, and he was doing these exaggerated accents with ridiculous sayings—like Dr. Phil.

Rosner: The accent of a Southern guy?

Jacobsen: Yeah, but performed like Dr. Phil, with these over-the-top Texasisms.

Rosner: My wife sometimes watched Dr. Phil—not because she liked him, but because she liked hearing people solve their problems. There was a kind of horrible, white-trash drama element to it. She was always amazed that Dr. Phil never actually helped anyone.

It’s like the solutions never amounted to anything. At the end, he’d say, “We’re going to get you help,” but nothing would happen. It was all theatre.

Jacobsen: I’ll pull it up. What’s the name of that comedian again? Johnny Pemberton. He’s the one who said stuff like:

“I’ve seen pickles walk backwards faster than that turtle can jump.”

It’s just absurd and specific.

Rosner: Yeah. Like Southern Mad Libs—you plug in a few nouns and verbs and go.

Jacobsen: “I’ve seen a moon darker than a dog turd, and I still couldn’t find my way home.”

Rosner: “Hornier than a hound dog full of June bugs.”

Jacobsen: “You can put a raccoon in a rat trap, but if it’s got a tail, it knows how to get out.”

“This young lady here’s been pissing in a bucket with a hole in it. Sweetheart, your mama loves you, but if you keep walking like a train down a hill, you’ll meet someone who doesn’t know how to say yes to an answer.”

Rosner: “Sweetheart, look—we’re all here. But don’t jack off my grandpa and tell me you’re churning milk.”

Jacobsen: That’s it. These sayings are dumb, vaguely meaningful, and deeply rural. They all involve specific, grounded imagery—like tacos, hills, dirt, turtles, beavers, raccoons, and rat traps. It’s all very earthy. Literal. It’s almost biblical in tone but with barnyard logic. That’s farm culture for you—concrete language, visual metaphors, and much folksy charm that masks some real grit.

That’s how it is—everything’s very concrete. For example, when someone says pitchfork, it does not matter what kind. I know exactly what they mean. Grain, hay—it does not matter whether you’re talking about timothy hay, alfalfa hay, or local hay. You know? Those kinds of distinctions are more for nutrition values and feed quality.

Rosner: You ever listened to Adam Carolla? He was good. I worked on Crank Yankers, the prank call show. My brain was too slow to be good at it, but some people—like Carolla—were incredible. He had that fast-talking, confident delivery.

He’d call people pretending to be a housing inspector or something, and as the call escalated and became more ridiculous when they started to get suspicious, he’d reel them back in and hit them with an avalanche of carpentry terms.

“You’re gonna need three-sixteenths-inch hex bolts.”

“If your foundation isn’t through-bolted into epoxy, with seven-sixteenths bolts spaced every 16 inches, it’s not gonna pass inspection.”

He’d just go bam, bam, bam with legit terms—and they’d believe him. That’s the trick. Hit people with enough real stuff, and they lose track of what’s absurd. There used to be a show on ABC called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. They’d tear down a house and build a brand-new one for some hard-luck family—all in about a week. The host was Ty Pennington.

Good-looking guy. And at some point in every episode, he’d be shirtless doing some kind of carpentry.

So Pennington came on Carolla’s show once, and Carolla asked him, “How tall is a standard interior door?” And Pennington didn’t know the answer.

Jacobsen: Oof.

Rosner: Carolla’s response: “That’s not a real carpenter.” The answer is 80 inches. A standard interior door in the U.S. is six feet eight inches. That makes sense.

Carolla knew his stuff. He was a carpenter for 20, maybe 25 years. He grew up in the Valley—white trash, depressed, divorced parents in the ’70s. That meant terrible schools. It was a laissez-faire era in education. The hippies had taken over, and nobody cared much about standards anymore.

He grew up learning a whole bunch of nothing, and he talks about this a lot. He’s really into his personal history—growing up in an A-frame. His parents somehow held it together enough to buy one.

Jacobsen: You mean an A-frame house? Yes, we’ve got some of those up here. Triangular from roof to ground—looks like a significant capital “A.”

Rosner: The roofline runs to the ground. Usually, it’s two stories. The second floor is this tight, angled space—barely enough room for a bed and maybe a bureau. The ground floor is where the living happens—kitchen, living room, perhaps a tiny dining area. I imagine their place was around a thousand square feet. They probably scraped together $35,000 to buy it close to the freeway.

Jacobsen: That sounds about right for the era.

Rosner: Anyway, now Carolla buys problem homes—or at least he used to. I mean, absolute stunners—beautiful old movie star mansions with major structural issues. And he’s into it. He loves the engineering challenge.

Jacobsen: Like, what kinds of problems?

Rosner: One house from the 1940s was partially cantilevered—part of it was hanging off a foundation extension. But the cantilever had failed, and that whole section was collapsing. Another house he bought had roof trusses that had been given out. The roof was flattening and pushing the walls outward. He had to reverse-engineer the whole thing to regain structural integrity.

That takes profound know-how. He engineered this wild underground swimming pool with an adjoining bar at that same movie star house. The bar had porthole windows—James Bond style—so you could sit there and watch people swimming through the portholes.

That would never pass building code in L.A. today. And yet, somehow, he got it approved. L.A. has one of the toughest building codes in the country. But Carolla managed to talk the inspectors into letting him do this insane stuff. He’s like a homemade engineering prodigy—or an idiot savant, depending on your take.

He also collects high-end cars—Le Mans, Maseratis, and even cars previously owned by Paul Newman. So, he designed a car elevator to bring one of his favourite cars up from the garage to his breakfast nook. That way, he could eat breakfast while admiring whichever car he felt like looking at that day.

That’s wild—in a brilliant way. A kid growing up white trash in North Hollywood who ends up designing car elevators and engineering Bond-style pools. It’s the kind of ingenuity that comes from building shit yourself because no one ever handed you the fancy version.

Anything else?

Jacobsen: That’s it for today, man. I’m good.

Rosner: Funny as hell, though—which is another crazy thing about Carolla. Growing up, white trash somehow became the sand in his oyster, which turned him into a pearl. It triggered this analytic ability—this sharp, precise mind, though sometimes it goes off-track. I don’t always agree with him. Over the last ten years, he’s been hanging out with Dennis Prager, a semi-charlatan right-winger. Carolla’s gone increasingly libertarian.

And when you go libertarian, you can end up in weird company. His libertarianism is probably grounded—he’s intelligent and analytical. But when you surround yourself with other libertarians, their ideological funk starts to rub off. Before long, you’re buying into bad ideas just by association.

Jacobsen: “This young gentleman here’s got too much sand in his oyster. He’s going to have a hard time making any pearls.”

Rosner: All right, man. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m heading to the gym.

Photo by Rachel Reinhardt on Unsplash

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project; International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416); The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576); Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066); A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.