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By Lee Zimmerman
There’s something about the South. Yes, that seems like a blanket statement of sorts, but there’s no denying its unique culture, its various quirks and outsize personality. And while there are cherished traditions and a deep, abiding love for its history and heritage, there are also some things that only a true Southerner can appreciate.
Mary Ryan Brown and Landon Bryant understand, and they bring that insight, with humor, wit and whimsy, to stages throughout the U.S. courtesy of their Southern Nights Comedy Tour. Local audiences will get the chance to see for themselves when Brown and Bryant bring the show to the Clayton Center for the Arts on Thursday, Nov. 12.
Brown both celebrates and mocks the cultural carnival of the South through her caricatures of Southern women while taking great joy in singing the praises of the outliers, the deviants and the squeaky wheels who make life colorful. Her takes on relationships, family life and Southern culture have led to a stand-up career that has seen her sell out clubs across the country, shoot a Dry Bar Comedy special, act in a Southern Living limited series and open for nationally known comedians including Ryan Hamilton and Heather McMahan.
Landon Bryant has made his name as a bestselling author whose stories about Southern life have won him a massive following. Known for his viral storytelling, he has parlayed millions of online views into sold-out live shows, appearances at the Grand Ole Opry and on Nateland Live at Zanies in Nashville, and a rapidly expanding national fan base.
Together, they promise a fast-paced night of stand-up filled with recognizable characters and relatable scenarios.
Let’s Be Blount recently spoke with Brown, who provided a preview of what audiences might expect.
Let’s Be Blount: So how did you and Landon meet?
Mary Ryan Brown: Landon and I are actually from towns about 30 minutes apart from one another. We grew up in an area of Mississippi called the Pine Belt. Landon is from a town called Laurel, which is famous as the setting of the HGTV show ‘Home Town,’ and I’m from Hattiesburg, home to the University of Southern Mississippi. So he and I both have deep Southern roots. We grew up in these places where storytelling really was at the center of what people did. What we lacked in entertainment and infrastructure, we kind of made up for in narrative, and we’ve just always been surrounded by characters, and I think by virtue of those surroundings, we became characters ourselves. A lot of Landon’s online content is based on the premise of “Let’s discuss.” Let’s discuss a pallet in the living room. Let’s discuss these Southern concepts that maybe people from outside of the South wouldn’t understand. A lot of my content is satirizing and celebrating Southern women, and so we found sort of a natural overlap in our content as well as with our values and what we’re passionate about as artists. Landon reached out to me about two years ago and asked me to open for him at a theater show he was doing in Laurel, and ever since then, we just became fast friends, and we’ve loved sharpening each other’s storytelling. We’ll sit there and critique each other’s sets and punch up each other’s jokes. And I feel like when you come to our show, if you don’t get something from me, you’re going to get it from Landon, and vice versa.
LBB: So what roles do you play in that matrix?
MRB: I’m a little bit more, I would say, biting and sarcastic, and Landon is definitely more charming and storytelling-based. But so far, people have just been thrilled because I talk about weddings. Landon talks about funerals. I tell stories about my crazy husband. Landon tells stories about his crazy grandparents and aunts and uncles. So by the end of the show, it feels like a Southern family reunion.
LBB: How did you get into comedy and decide to make it a career?
MRB: I grew up in a very funny family. The laughter was really how we related to one another in our family. Also, I am a writer by trade. I have a master’s degree in creative writing with an emphasis on fiction. I’ve always loved to read, write, talk, and perform, and comedy allows me to do all four of those things, and really just connect with people. I started writing comedy after my daughter was born, late at night. I would be up feeding her, and I would watch comedy specials. And I had postpartum depression, so comedy helped pull me out of that depression. I would watch these specials and pause them every 10 seconds, and write down everything that the comic was saying, just to see how it felt to write a good joke. I did that for a while. And then, when my daughter was a year and a half old, I decided to go to my first open mic. That was in 2022, and I have been going and going ever since.
LBB: Can you give us an idea of the format? Do you interact with one another?
MRB: I do 40 minutes of my own material. Then Landon does 40 minutes of his material, and then he and I have a combined portion at the end of the show where we make cracks at one another, and we ask each other about the material that we’ve just covered, and then we take questions from the audience. The show is usually about 90 to 95 minutes, and we end together onstage..
LBB: How much of that is spontaneous? Is there any improvisation on the spot?
MRB: It’s definitely impromptu in the moment. It’s all about being a handful, a hoot and a holler. I’ve been accused of all of it.
LBB: What distinguishes a Southern point of view from, say, a Midwestern or a California perspective?
MRB: Absolutely. I think embellishment is a huge part of the Southern point of view, as well as pacing and poetics. So I would say the three sort of pillars to me of Southern storytelling would be embellishment, pacing, and poetics. We understand the power of enhancing the truth, and I think that it’s a given that we’re going to enhance the truth when we tell a story. People aren’t upset about that because the embellishment is part of the fun. As far as pacing is concerned, I think Southern people see the value in taking a story slowly, and I think we know when to slow down for emphasis, even in the way we speak with a Southern drawl. That’s part of pacing our stories and building suspense, and then poetics, the way that we use language when we’re just sharing stories, sitting on the front porch. We’re not interested in just conveying the data of what happened. We’re painting pictures with our words, and so I think those three things, to me, would sort of sum up how the perspective is different from maybe a Midwestern or coastal perspective.
LBB: Have you taken the tour outside the South? Does it need translating in the Midwest or New England, or do they get it?
MRB: That’s a great question. What we find is that the shows outside of the South have become such a great gift for us, because there are two extremes at those shows. There are people who have no familiarity with the South, and then there are just tons of Southern expats who find themselves in different corners of the world, but still miss home. And we’re like a slice of home for them. But at these shows outside of the South, we end up having to work a little harder to be a bit more pedagogical about the Southern perspective, and to teach other people from other places what it’s like to be from the South, which is just as funny. It’s just as funny to build a bridge between my experience and the experience of a Yankee, for lack of a better term. It’s definitely like a thought experiment, but we have a lot of fun, and I think we’ve been better received, especially by Southern expats, at these shows outside of the South. It’s been an even warmer welcome than some of the shows in the South.
LBB: Do your Southern audiences ever take offense at some of the things you say?
MRB: No, I think Landon and I do a good job of celebrating this place that we’re from and this place that we love. It’s a different thing altogether. If we were going to the north and just like bashing Pittsburgh for some reason when we haven’t ever lived there, then that would be a problem, and I think people would have a right to sort of bristle at that. However, Landon and I are from the South. The South made us, and we love this place, and that’s why we love laughing at it.
LBB: Is there anything about Southern culture that still baffles you, or do you just take it all in stride?
MRB: I think the more you look at anything closely, the stranger and more foreign it becomes. So I find that the more I study the South, the more I recognize its absurdity, while I also come to love it more.
LBB: These are difficult times, and many people seem to have lost their sense of humor. There’s distance, there’s anger. Does that make it harder to break through?
MRB: I actually don’t think so. I think people are hungry to laugh. I think people want to laugh. I think in our hearts, we want to connect, and I think the greatest challenge of all is just making time for that. But once we do, once you get into that auditorium and the lights come down and the music goes up and the microphones turn on, I think people are ready and eager to laugh.
LBB: Do you ever get stage fright? If you’re having a bad day, does it affect the performance?
MRB: Sure, I have stage fright. I’m kind of just scared all the time. I’m a pretty nervous person. I’m scared right now.
LBB: There’s no need to be scared during this particular call.
MRB: I’m just pretty nervous all the time, and so I figured out early on that I might as well do it nervously and scared. I’m more afraid of not doing it than I am of doing it. How I feel in my personal life cannot dictate what I give as a performer, and so I give 100% every single time.
LBB: So you enjoy the travel?
MRB: I love the travel. I really do. I was thinking about this yesterday at the airport. Maybe this is a little crass, but as I was leaving the airport yesterday, thinking about this wonderful show that we had in Raleigh-Durham, and walking through the airport parking lot, I smelled urine. I was just in New Orleans and I smelled urine a lot. Let me tell you what else smells of urine. Every downtown of every city ever, and so I just had this realization that if you travel, if you put yourself in new environments, you’re gonna meet amazing new people. You’re gonna have all these new opportunities, but you’re also gonna smell piss sometimes and that’s just what comes with it.
LBB: Traveling certainly has its hazards. Add the urine smell to the list, I suppose.
MRB: Yeah, that’s what comes with it. Sometimes you lose your luggage. Sometimes your high heel breaks. All of that. But also, sometimes you meet the most incredible, incredible people that you wouldn’t have met otherwise. Sometimes you’re walking late night in Philadelphia and you might stumble upon Benjamin Franklin’s grave. That happened to me on Friday.
LBB: One would hope Ben’s grave doesn’t smell of urine.
MRB: It does, but it’s part of the urine that founded this country.
LBB: Hopefully you can overlook that.
MRB: I’ve had the opportunity to see parts of this country I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. I wouldn’t have gone to Springfield, Missouri, and to see these towns, and to travel with Landon, and to experience both the South and regions outside of the South as artists. To synthesize this travel and share this experience together has been really, really cool. Leaving my family is hard, but often my husband comes with me and sometimes in the summers, my daughter will come with me. We’re so excited to come to Maryville and to do this show, and we’re thankful that you’re covering us too.
LBB: So how do you come up with material? Is that a challenge at all?
MRB: It is. It’s the biggest challenge in the world. Well, maybe not the biggest challenge in the world. My God, some people have cancer. Some people tell me, “Mary, you could have been a motivational speaker,” and I think I could have. I think I could actually do that much more easily than I could being a comedian. But it takes a certain sort of linguistic and perspectival alchemy to be able to write a joke and perform a joke and connect with people in the present moment, and it’s really hard. I think the only way you become successful at it is by failing at it. I still bomb on stage, and I have bombed many times, but there is no substitute for stage time, and there is no substitute for solitude and writing, and so you have to constantly be engaged in both of those practices in order to be any good at it.
LBB: Do you ever have to tweak things in the midst of the performance or after the fact? Switch gears?
MRB: Yes, you have to. The best comics are adaptable and can rewrite and edit kind of in the moment. It’s really just about acknowledging the present moment and viewing the performance as an offering instead of an obstacle or a task to complete. So I’m really thankful to do it.
LBB: Do you get hecklers?
MRB: Yes. It builds character. Mainly though, people just feel they want to tell us about their families, and they want to tell us about their Southern experiences and their stories. And we’re so honored to share that with them. It’s really lovely.
LBB: Maybe you can get some material out of that. You never know.
MRB: It’s funny you mention that because Landon and I just filmed a promotional video, and we ask, ‘Is it Maryville or Murvuhl?’ Hopefully people will engage with that.
LBB: Just remember, it’s not Mary-ville. It’s Murvuhl. M-U-R-V-U-H-L. Try to get it down to one syllable.
MRB: I will be working on it. I’m already rehearsing that.
If you go
What: Southern Nights Comedy Tour featuring Mary Ryan Brown and Landon Bryant
When: 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 12
Where: Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre, Clayton Center for the Arts, Maryville College, 502 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway, Maryville
How much: $37.95–$51.85
Tickets: claytonartscenter.com
