Issue #68: The Best Country Parody of the 21st Century

An oral history of Memphis Kansas Breeze.

By Natalie

At the risk of stating the obvious, humor is a big part of country music — a genre best known for either sad songs or party music meant for listeners with little to no self awareness. Wit and self-deprecation are a big part of the music going all the way back to the beginning, though, which is one reason why so many takes on country parody ring hollow to me. The music is an easy target in a lot of ways, so I can hardly be mad at anyone who takes the layup…but most of it is just not all that funny (at least not funnier than some of the actual songs put out by Music Row, as we often spotlight in this very newsletter).

So when my now-husband Jonny told me I had to listen to a country parody bit on a podcast that I hadn't heard of called Comedy Bang Bang (look, I'm not really a podcast person), I rolled my eyes and braced myself for more basic jokes about trucks and beers and white trash and whatnot. What I got instead was something I have listened to at least 25 times since, and made basically everyone I've ever met listen to (you may have caught a few links to it in this newsletter): Meet Memphis Kansas Breeze.

Yes, there are jokes about trucks and beer and all the usual things, but they're good jokes! There's also jokes about winning the same CMA a million years in a row, which actually happens (obviously they're riffing on Florida Georgia Line, but at this point it's little more like Old Dominion…), about country stars who are actually AI, about truck high school…you just gotta listen. It goes absurd in all the right ways for me personally, and I laugh every dang time.

So, mostly for myself and a little bit for all you friends of the newsletter, I decided to get the story behind Memphis Kansas Breeze, from gelatinous gas to building a computer out of a Toyota Camry chassis (why can't they get to the internet??) to human skin truck babies, directly from the sources — Brad Evans and Nick Ciarelli, who conceived of the bit and wrote the songs, and Carl Tart, who performed it alongside Drew Tarver (who I was unable to track down for this piece).

Brad Evans: I grew up in Southern California, but my dad had a truck that, according to him, only got country music on the radio. I think he just liked it and felt embarrassed. All four of us kind of grew up with a lot of that music, and really enjoy it. You know, hate the bad stuff and like the good stuff, but also think some of the bad stuff's funny.

Carl Tart: '90s country was my favorite — Trisha Yearwood, Brooks and Dunn, Randy Travis. I sing a lot of Zac Brown Band at karaoke. Morgan Wallen, he's got a few bangers out right now that I can't let go. Randall King, I like him too. Josh Kiser's got a song called "Big On The Little Things" that I really like. Of course Florida Georgia Line.

Brad Evans: On Mr. Show, Bob Odenkirk does a country singer called C.S. Lewis Jr. In the sketch, there's like, a movement to blow up the moon. He sings a song about blowing up the moon, kind of encouraging it in this jingoistic way. It's pretty funny.

Nick Ciarelli: It's like a proto-"Courtesy of the Red White and Blue." His look is very Hank Williams, Jr. 

Brad Evans: We used to have a monthly comedy show in L.A. at UCB [Upright Citizen's Brigade] called Atlantic City that Drew and Carl and a bunch of other amazing people would do, and we would write material for them for that. We've tested out a lot of the stuff we've written for Comedy Bang Bang in that live space.

Carl Tart: The main cast of it was Brad and Nick, who would showcase a lot of their writing and also do performance bits. Sarah Sherman was a part of it, and Betsy Sodaro and Lou Wilson, as well as myself and Drew. Other people would jump onstage, too. 

Brad Evans: We just had this idea for a song called "Pickup Truck Birthday Party." I truly think we were sitting on that idea for maybe two-and-a-half years. Like, we were just like, "Oh yeah, that'd be something funny to do."

Carl Tart: Drew and I were looking for a bit to do together, and we're both born Southerners and like country music [Tart is from Mississippi, and Tarver is from Georgia.]

Nick Ciarelli: Definitely with doing that monthly show, we were always very much under the gun — just like blinders on, we got to get something done, let's figure it out. So once we decided to finally write it, two days or so before our show, we were up until two or three in the morning just singing these really rough scratch tracks into GarageBand. 

Brad Evans: We just kind of started singing stupid lyrics over existing tracks, and then it came from there. 

Nick Ciarelli: We did sort of a blind search of what the top country songs were at the time, and got the instrumental versions that kind of populate YouTube. [Their parody songs use FGL's "H.O.L.Y." and "Dirt," and Luke Bryan's "Play It Again."] Then as we listened to them, we just made up the melodies and lyrics off of that, inspired by what we were hearing.

Brad Evans: We've written other songs for Drew before. Nick usually just sings them. I think Nick's a good singer, but I'm always very thrown that it's like an octave higher than I was expecting. You have a pretty deep speaking voice.

Nick Ciarelli: I think I was doing the Drew parts, Brad was doing the Carl parts. We were in our apartment that we shared in Hollywood, just kind of hunched over one of those Yeti microphones.

Brad Evans: We came up with the name Memphis Kansas Breeze, and created the characters and named them and stuff. We wrote some intro jokes for them to do, too.

Ed.: Like, "number one band for people who watch stepmom porn"?

Brad Evans: Yeah, I think we wrote that joke. 

Nick Ciarelli: We were just trying to figure out what made them… stand out, I guess, from other country artists.

Brad Evans: I think "Cruise" is a good song. It came on the radio the other day and I liked it. [Florida Georgia Line] were definitely the jumping off point for this — the name was, of course. I don't think they think they're making, like high art —I think they're like, "Yeah, this is fun music for people to drink to and stuff."

Nick Ciarelli: In the moment it was like anything — when we write stuff together, we're just sort of like, "This is funny." But we didn't really think of it as anything that was super different, or guess that it would have the lifespan that it did.

We cold-emailed the songs to Carl and Drew just like, "Hey, here's this. Is this anything?" Those very rough demos of the songs still exist somewhere deep on our email... 

Carl Tart: I thought it was hilarious and stupid and silly as hell, a perfect encapsulation of how Brad and Nick write because their joke brains go a mile a minute. We always love collaborating with them because they just have such a mad genius, kooky style when it comes to joke writing. 

Brad Evans: Once Drew and Carl did it at the show, we were like, "Oh, this feels really funny and special and good." I think Carl added the "Toot beep" thing when we were rehearsing.

Carl Tart: We did it [at UCB] and it went really well, so we decided to do those characters on Comedy Bang Bang. Some of those same jokes showed up on Bang Bang, but then, you know, we gotta talk to Scott [Aukerman] for 30 minutes so a lot of new stuff comes along with that. That's when we kind of came up with a lot more of the lore. One thing that I said that people really took to — which was a throwaway line for me — was that when you put gas in the freezer, it becomes gelatinous. People enjoyed that. 

Brad Evans: It was fun to get to have them do it on Comedy Bang Bang, a show we've loved and listened to for a long time. 

Nick Ciarelli: Yeah, that was a huge honor. They elevated everything so much, and figured out all these fun bells and whistles to add to the characters and little moments in all the songs the more they did it. 

Brad Evans: It's been really cool to see the fan response. In "Pickup Truck Birthday Party," we wrote a line that the truck's birthday is February 23. It's become this weird little holiday for the fans. Like, they'll all be reposting the stuff every year on that date, tagging all of us. 

Carl Tart: We've only done it on the podcast in studio once, and then we did it at the live show in Toronto. [On Comedy Bang Bang, comedians often do the same characters on different episodes — sometimes many different episodes.] But people love it so much. Like, so much.

Brad Evans: A lot of fans are commenting on Drew and Carl's social media posts saying, "Honk honk" or "Beep beep." I'm sure it gets annoying for those guys, but I think we're all thrilled and excited about the response from people.

Carl Tart: I'll post like, "Happy birthday to my Grandma" and somebody will be like "Honk beep." 

But I also love the fact that they love it. I can't be mad about that. Apparently, there's a trivia team that names themselves "Pickup Truck Birthday Party" or something like that, and I've seen I've been tagged in a couple of their posts. So thank you all for that.

What surprises me is when celebrities say that they like it, like when Jon Hamm or Ty Burrell  go, "Hey, you do the country thing!" That's always fun. 

Brad Evans: The four of us are working on some new stuff with those characters, with the band. I can't really be more specific at this time… but it was a thing that you could see in Los Angeles in the past and hopefully we get back to that at some point. 

Carl Tart: There are definitely some future plans. Y'all don't have to live with just those three songs. There were three more songs that we were going to debut when we got to Canada, but the show went too long so we just did two new ones, "Oil Change" and “My Truck Found God Today.”

But there are plans, me and the guys have our group chat and stuff. Some exciting things are happening at Burger King. 

Brad Evans: I think we did that bit for the first time probably early 2019. We should have kept running with it, but I think we felt like, "Let's not touch it, let's not mess it up." Then the pandemic happened, and the four of us all got split apart on different television shows [Evans and Ciarelli became writers for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, which they just left to pursue their own projects; Tarver was on The Other Two, and Tart was on a number of shows including Grand Crew]. But I think we're all eager to get back to work on that and build it into a larger kind of project.

Nick Ciarelli: If you can put us up somewhere on Music Row, we're down.

Brad Evans: If anyone in Nashville is reading this, we love writing songs. 

[Brad and Nick’s YouTube channel is also extremely hilarious, especially the Barstool bit...]