It’s just Clive’s dry wit at work. It’s a joke, but not the kind that’s supposed to get a big laugh. It’s the sort of humor that aims at an amused smirk, not a loud guffaw, hence the lack of reaction from the audience and performers.
…so it’s not from the popular rappism “Pimps up, Ho’s Down”? then? 
Spot on. I find the difference between the audience behaviour in the British and American versions of the show quite fascinating - the American ones make more noise, but as punctuation of jokes, rather than the more continuous lower-level giggles and so on from the Brits.
What kind of effed-up logic is that? The correct spelling of a word has nothing to do with its definition, use, or intended audience. The idea that a word’s spelling is “fluid” because it’s for “uneducated” people demonstrates your own ignorance (in more ways than one).
Fair enough, I suppose. Again, I didn’t think it was supposed to be humorous because nobody so much as groaned. But both points are valid.
Furthermore, I’m 90% sure that nobody I talk to on a regular basis has ever seen Hee Haw.
Fair enough. Thanks for taking my comment in the spirit it was intended, BTW–looking back I could’ve used fairer words.
I saw no smirks, though. That’s the issue that started the whole conundrum. Even Greg Proops smirks at Clive Anderson’s humor sometimes, when they’re not trading fire.
Having attended a (very small) number of Hollywood comedy shows myself, I can say that most of that crowd comes to a comedy show expecting to be slammed with devastating punchlines, rather than fed a slow but steady stream of amusement.
Fair enough. As you’ll note from my use of the first-person singular, though, I was talking about how I had viewed it in the past, not saying “Piffle on you for trying to spell a word when it’s not important!”
Oh I didn’t take it personally. There’s no disputing the idea that hoedowns were largely a pastime for the uneducated. Just so long as we don’t confuse being “uneducated” with being “unintelligent,” I’ve got no beef with your statement.
Of course. Uneducated was what I meant. I’ve met lots of brilliant people with little or no serious formal education.
Why, the little missus and I plan on heading to Hoedowns this very Thursday night…Ladies’ night ;).
I’ve also been to many hoedown dances.
If you listen carefully to Clive Anderson’s introductions to the sketches and the guests, you can hear his disdain toward Americans. It’s subtle, and it’s no more than you would hear in a lot of Brits of his education, age, and social class, but it’s there. Like most Brits of that sort, he consides American humor to be a little bit crude and oafish when compared with the ironic wit that Brits are capable of. The whole idea of the hoedown is a slur on Americans. Anderson knew perfectly well that fairly few Americans these days go to (or have even heard of) hoedowns. The idea was to have some supposedly American format in which the British guests could make the sort of openly nasty statements that Brits don’t usually make.
The irony then is that the British version slowly turned into a showcase for the American (and occasionally Canadian) guests on the program. Of the seven people who appeared most often as guests, four were American or Canadian. Even stranger, by the last season of the British show, all the filming of the British version was filmed on the American set, presumably because it was cheaper to do so. The program didn’t even make stars of the British comedians that Anderson thought he was going to promote the careers of. Michael McShane, an American stand-up comic who’s still not really a star in the U.S. became better known in the U.K. and did more episodes of the British version than John Sessions, a British actor who, I think, Anderson seemed to be pushing as the hot new thing at the beginning of the British version.
No, Clive Anderson is snarky about everyone and everything. That’s his schtick (or was, he’s sort of semi-retired from TV now). I think they just ran out of ideas for musical genres, because they used to do another one called “march”. The contestants used to sort of look at each other as if to say WTF is a march?
Anyway, it was just as likely to be the producers who dreamed up things like the hoedown.
Well, I have, so you sort of know one.
I also married into a genuine Appalacian hillbilly family. Yeah, I’m weird (but not as weird as my in-laws)