Second look at "Honey Boo Boo"?

But the members of the Boo Boo clan actually seem to enjoy spending time with each other, which is saying a lot for any group of people on TV. Granted, family time sometimes involves playing “Guess Whose Breath” (it’s exactly what it sounds like) and eating a dish called “sketti” made from pasta and a sauce of microwaved Country Crock margarine and ketchup. But David Brooks and his ilk would be hard-pressed to argue that their lives are substantively worse than those of, say, the nascent alcoholics of Jersey Shore or any of the Real Housewives.

And while Here Comes Honey Boo Boo might be grounds for a lot of nose-wrinkling, it’s no reason to despair. After all, the stars’ nigh-incomprehensible dialect and penchant for bodily-function humor make them direct cultural heirs of Flannery O’Connor’s amputees, hermaphrodites, and street preachers. Their hometown is just 20 minutes from hers, and their behavior wouldn’t have surprised her a bit. And don’t tell me Samuel Clemens wouldn’t have loved Guess Whose Breath. The family members’ nicknames — including Sugar Bear, Chubbs, Pumpkin, and Chickadee — could have been taken from a Faulkner novel. And while the show is less than literary, it’s also less than groundbreaking. The fact is, there have always been poor and poorly educated people who think halitosis is hilarious. And the rest of the country has always found their antics wildly entertaining. From the southwestern humorists to The Beverly Hillbillies, this brand of entertainment — lowbrow though it may be — is a pretty fundamental part of the American experience. It’s not everyone’s piece of pecan pie, as it were, but it’s also not a cultural crisis.