In Popular Culture
Robert Schenkkan's play The Handler deals with the apparent death of a first-time snake handler and the involvement of law enforcement; in this case, the sheriff also being a snake handler.
Ray Stevens's "Smoky Mountain Rattlesnake Retreat" comedically portrays a couple going to a Bible camp where snakes are passed around. It ends with the singer's wife stomping the rattlesnakes to death. It appears on his Surely You Joust album.
The second season of Saturday Night Live included a sit-com parody called The Snake-Handling O'Sheas.
The X Files episode "Signs and Wonders" deals heavily with snake handling.
In the fourth season episode of the television series The Simpsons, titled Homer the Heretic, the local bartender Moe Szyslak, when asked to join a different religion, declares, "I was born a Snake Handler, and I'll die a Snake Handler." He then displays his badly snakebitten and bandaged hands.
In the 1991 movie Cape Fear, the character Max Cady (played by Robert De Niro) comes from a family of snake handlers.
In the 2012 movie The Campaign, Congressman Cam Brady (Played by Will Ferrell) attempts to boost his campaign popularity by joining a church of Snake Handlers in their sermon, where he is bitten.
Read more about this topic: Snake Handling
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)