Growing Up in Louisiana

Theo Von grew up in Covington, Louisiana, a small town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. The way he describes it, Covington was less a town than a collection of characters held together by humidity and bad decisions.

"Where I'm from, people's yards had animals in them. Not pets—animals. Like, animals that shouldn't be in a yard. A guy on my street had an emu. Nobody asked why. It was just there. The emu was there."

Von's Louisiana material is his richest vein. He has an endless supply of stories about neighbors, relatives, and strangers who behaved in ways that would be shocking anywhere else but were simply normal in Covington.

"My neighbor used to mow his lawn at midnight. With a headlamp. Like he was mining for grass. Nobody said anything because his other hobby was firearms."

The specificity is what makes the material land. These aren't generic "small-town" stories—they're stories that could only come from a particular place, told by someone who observed everything and understood very little of it at the time.

"We had a guy who lived in a van behind the Piggly Wiggly. Everybody knew him. My mom would bring him food. He wasn't homeless—he just liked the van. He had a house. He just preferred the van. The van was near the Piggly Wiggly and the Piggly Wiggly had food, so the math checked out."

Von tells these stories with the wonder of someone who escaped and the affection of someone who's glad he was there. Louisiana made him weird, and the weirdness became his superpower. No other comedian has these stories because no other comedian grew up in the same exact confluence of poverty, warmth, strangeness, and Southern charm.

"I love where I'm from. I don't understand it. But I love it."