Justin Darnell didn’t expect any of this.
He didn’t expect to be a successful entrepreneur, bringing dozens of jobs to his eastern Kentucky hometown. He didn’t expect to have a completely separate career as an online comedian with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of likes.
He didn’t expect it because, for about a dozen years, he was in the grips of alcohol and opioid addiction.
But that part was somewhat expected. Justin comes from generations of addicts. His mother died of an overdose when he was 14. He became an addict himself at 18, and life looked bleak. He found himself living in a dilapidated trailer and driving a Chevy Cobalt that fell apart more and more each time it rained.
“I was just living drunk with no responsibility, no job, living off my dad’s charity,” Justin said. “All I did was play video games, get drunk and …” for lack of better words, try to hook up with women on Tinder.
It was during this time that he started trying his hand at standup comedy. This was also somewhat expected, as Justin had been labeled the “class clown” all the way back in kindergarten.
But instead of giving him clarity about his addiction, Justin found that poking fun at himself was the perfect way to avoid confronting his circumstances.
“It was almost like armor, to laugh at myself for being the ne’er-do-well drunk that couldn’t hold down a job,” he said. “We’ve all seen the characters in television that’s sort of the lovable drunk guy or maybe the drunken badass. And part of it seemed cool.”
As much as he wanted to be a boozy layabout, Justin had ambition, even while he was in active addiction. This entrepreneurial attitude stemmed back to his childhood.
When he was a kid, he sold raffle tickets at the local Advance Auto Parts, “not knowing you were supposed to have a prize to raffle off. I just thought you sold raffle tickets.”
Justin also has a problem with authority. He didn’t want a boss. So becoming a small business owner seemed a natural fit.
He managed to get a loan, find a location and open a smoke shop in his hometown of Salyersville, KY. He ran the store for about a month before his substance abuse took over again.
“You can steal a few moments here and there, even in active addiction. You can stay clean for a few hours or a day and get something done. But until those manacles are taken off, you can’t move more than a couple feet,” he said.
After opening, his sister helped take over the store, which became a success. Justin said seeing that gave him the confidence to change other things about his life.
“Well, hell — if I did this, what else can I do?” he thought. “Maybe I can get off drugs.”
A year after he opened the smoke shop, Justin got sober. He got back into his business.
“Once I got clean, that’s when it went into overdrive,” he said.
He opened more businesses: a coffee shop, a medical taxi service and a donut truck. And he started to channel his comedic tendencies by making videos on what was then a new app: TikTok.
Now that he didn’t need to use comedy as a shame shield, he turned the focus of his material outward, onto the culture he grew up in. One of his first minor hits was a series called “Appalachian Word of the Day.”
“I’ve always been fascinated with our language,” Justin said. “I remember, my mamaw would always say, ‘That smells like kyarn.’”
He never thought much about what “kyarn” might be, until one day he came across the word “carrion.” He turned the mix-up into a short video, along with other regional expressions like “gom” or “sworp.” The series became a modest hit, earning thousands of views, likes and comments.
Then Justin started a series featuring Appalachia-fied versions of popular characters. “Dracler,” Justin’s take on the classic vampire, wears a tuxedo t-shirt and a black mullet wig.
His “Appalachian Joker” (with makeup modeled after Heath Ledger’s version of the Batman villain) gestures to a yard full of immobile automobiles and asks “Wanna know how I got these cars?”
Instead of a culinarily gifted mouse, “Appalachian Ratatouille” features an opossum who teaches the protagonist — a shirtless Justin wearing bibbed overalls — how to cook crystal meth.
But nothing popped off quite like his “Small Town Facebook Page” series, which he introduced in January 2025 during the winter storms that blanketed much of central Appalachia in a thick layer of snow and ice.
“How are the roads from the suboxone clinic to the chicken fights right now?” Justin’s greasy t-shirt-wearing character asks in the first installment. “Biden is working with AEP to make it snow more.”
As of this writing, the video has 4.6 million views on TikTok and 464,000 views on Instagram Reels.
Justin said he didn’t expect the video to take his online comedy career to the next level. “You never know which one is going to go viral!” He believes the original video and its subsequent installments connected with viewers because they aren’t too dissimilar from real life Facebook posts he sees from people in his hometown.
“We’ve all seen the small town people on Facebook that don’t really understand what the etiquette is,” he said. Commenters have chimed in with their own small town social media posts, some of which have ended up in his videos. Justin said Appalachians are good at laughing at ourselves.
“We own it,” he said.
Appalachian people have long been a favorite target of joke writers looking for an easy laugh. But Justin’s parodies are different.
He doesn’t worry about the “rules” of comedy. Justin’s videos, above all else, will be funny — but even if there are jabs, or his videos push the limit, it’s from a place of love and respect for his home.
“Intention comes into play. If it’s done with love, that makes all the difference.”
“When I make fun of my dad for sending ‘thank you’ texts to automatic reminders, I don’t want him to feel bad. If it hurt his feelings, I’d quit.”
If anything, Justin’s videos highlight how similar small town Appalachia is to everywhere else.
“I live in the Kansas City metro, and I have to admit I’ve seen some of these in the last two days,” one commenter wrote.
“I live in Metro Detroit and this is our Facebook page every day,” another commented.
This connection with his audience, in and outside of Appalachia, is also unexpected for Justin.
Like many mountain kids, there was a time in his life when he was ashamed of his eastern Kentucky twang and attempted to rid himself of it.
“I tried to enunciate very clearly,” he explained.
His “proper” way of speaking began to earn him attention from adults, which only reinforced the behavior. “People would say, ‘Are you from Ohio?!'” But eventually, Justin grew tired of being something he wasn’t. He embraced the twang. And now it’s become a superpower of sorts.
A friend recently sent him a video of another comedian doing a similar “small town Facebook” schtick, with similar jokes. But there was one thing this Great Value brand Justin Darnell didn’t have: a hillbilly accent.
“It lends authority,” Justin said. “I like that our culture is being recognized and celebrated. Millions of people are seeing it and being able to appreciate our uniqueness.”
“I used to think it was improper.
And now I think kyarn is beautiful.”
Now that his videos have taken off, Justin is thinking about all the ways he can utilize his sense of humor, business acumen and funny way of talking. Online comedy has become a lucrative income stream, just like his other businesses. So he’d like to work on comedy projects with higher production values than his current setup, which usually involves some Amazon wigs and an iPhone. He’d like to get back into stand-up comedy.
But for now, Justin doesn’t have any concrete plans.
“Almost everything I’ve ever done that’s good in life wasn’t part of the plan.” He prefers the unexpected.
Photos by Justin Murphy of Out of the Attic Photography
