93 Days until Football Season: The Alabama Ostrich

Satire is at its best when that biting humor has more than a ring of truth to it: The Onion has created an empire with its stories of dubious validity. But that venerable humor site isn’t alone when it comes to poking at our foibles. The state of Alabama has its very own satirical genius in the form of Matt Mitchell, better known as the Alabama Ostrich.

The Ostrich began his online presence with jagged twitter barbs involving Walker County in general, and Jasper particularly. While that is still a staple of his witticism, Mitchell was eventually snatched up by Alabama Media Group and expanded into a full weekly column about rural southern living (insert Holly Hunter bona fide voice).

Like this gem about Alabama wedding planning:

In what’s being called one of the greatest feats of engineering since the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam, an Alabama woman has successfully planned her entire wedding without using a single piece of burlap.

Erin Pryor, the bride-to-be, announced the breakthrough to a small gathering of family and friends earlier this week before making her accomplishment known to the rest of the wedding planning community. Before today, it was believed to be impossible to plan a wedding in the South without the use of certain materials like burlap, mason jars, or twine.

According to experts, this latest development in the world of Southern wedding planning will open up a wealth of new materials, so long as those new materials are available at Hobby Lobby. Sarah Stephens, a local expert who has planned four of her own weddings, said this may finally open the door for other easily accessible materials such as chicken wire and reclaimed Alexander Shunnarah billboards.

When you know you’re going to be called a hick or a redneck or a hayseed no matter what you do, sometimes you just lean into it. And the Ostrich follows in the proud tradition of other Southerners who made a living off of humor that is as much insightful as it is self-deprecatory, like Jerry Clower and Jeff Foxworthy before him.

So, if you want to peruse a fun timeline, you can check out Matt on Twitter at @ALOstrich — and for my money that truncated 280-character format really highlights his skills as a humorist.

And, if longform and sketches are your thing, his complete archive is here.

93 Days until Football Season.

Roll Tide