Native Cajun Speaker Translates Assistant Coach In The Waterboy

Audio By Carbonatix

Remember Adam Sandler’s 1998 hit The Waterboy and how actor Blake Clark’s character ‘Farmer Fran’ was an assistant coach who would run around yelling what sounded like complete gibberish? Well, it turns out he was actually just dialing up the Cajun dialect to 11 but was speaking in full sentences.

The actor, Blake Clark, was born in Macon, Georgia and must’ve had some understanding of deep Southern accents being from that part of the country before he went off to Vietnam where he’d become a decorated platoon leader and then make his way to Hollywood upon return to the US, because his Cajun accent in The Waterboy is nearly perfect albeit thick.

For all these years, I simply thought he was doing a parody of Cajun accents. I didn’t realize until today that he was speaking lines and the players, at least the native Louisianans, should have been able to understand what he was saying. Then I came across this video on TikTok by Erin Claire and she translates the mostly-unintelligible gibberish for the rest of us so that after all these years we can learn what he was saying:

If you didn’t watch the video, please do. But Farm Fran’s quotes actually add to the dialog quite a bit. Here’s the best of Farmer Fran:

This might not be a major revelation for the readers down in Louisiana. If you understood what he was saying in The Waterboy for all of these years I’d just like to ask why you didn’t tell the rest of us about it until now? That could’ve been helpful information when watching the movie for the rest of the country who might never encounter a Cajun dialect.

After that video on The Waterboy above, I checked out the rest of her feed and found this fascinating:

Now we can all go forth into the world today and say we learned something new! So ‘thank you’ goes out to Erin Claire for her translation of The Waterboy and that clip above.