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Carl Hurley was born in 1941 in a two-room cabin built by his father on a three-acre hillside farm in the Appalachian mountains of Laurel County, Kentucky, near the Rockcastle River.
Carl Hurley came from a family of "talkers," and he spent endless hours listening to aunts, uncles and cousins swapping yarns and stories that were richly embellished after years of telling. The idea of "making people laugh" was a fascinating but far-flung idea for the young Hurley. Little did he realize that a career in education would eventually lead to a career in public speaking and entertainment, and garner him the title of America's Funniest Professor!
The idea began to germinate at age eight when his dad bought the family its first radio. The dial was set to WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, and every Saturday night young Carl listened to the Grand Ole Opry. His world opened up. "I remember listening to Minnie Pearl and Rod Brasfield," Hurley recalls to-day. "They were the first people I can ever remember making people laugh. I thought 'How great it would be..."
Hurley's first "audience" was at his one-room country church when he was called upon to recite a Scripture verse in front of the congregation. "I walked to the edge of the pulpit and said, 'Jesus fed the multitudes with three fishes and five loaves of light bread. For a minute I didn't know why they laughed, but I knew I enjoyed it" Carl says
At Mount Zion Elementary School, Carl Hurley was active in school plays and speech contests, and he fondly recalls that the only award he ever won as a youngster was in a contest for would-be radio announcers.
In the fifth grade, the young Hurley transferred to near-by Hazel Green Elementary and High School. He proudly became a Hazel Green 'Bullfrog' on the school's very first football team. "We didn't know much about football in the beginning," Hurley says with a grin, "We thought a football was a basketball that had laid out in the weather. I was a defensive lineman. I had to adjust to the psychological effect of looking across the line at someone called a 'tiger' and knowing that I was a 'bullfrog."
At the end of his senior year in high school, Carl Hurley headed to Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, and enrolled for the summer session. "Tuition was $37.50, and I had fifty dollars that I had been saving up for awhile, My dad said, 'Son, you should go, you'll have enough money left over to buy a book," Hurley related.
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