This is a great week to be Dusty Slay. His debut hour-long Netflix comedy special, “Workin’ Man,” is currently number three on that streaming giant’s top-10 most-watched TV shows list. That’s five spots ahead of superstar comedian Dave Chappelle’s latest special.

During Slay’s Jan. 19 appearance on “The Tonight Show,” he had host Jimmy Fallon doubling over with laughter. Country music icon Travis Tritt is a fan now, too.

“It’s an honor even to be on Netflix,” says Slay, who previously appeared in that platform’s “The Standups” compilation series. “But to be on there and to know that people are actually watching it, it’s like getting recognized by the industry, but also by people in general. And that’s great.”

Slay — a longhaired, trucker hat-sporting Opelika native – hastens to add, “The mayor of Opelika reached out and wants to meet me. I gotta tell you, to get a little hometown recognition feels good.”

Dusty Slay’s spent years building this. Early on, he worked soul-crushing day jobs, including at a pesticide company. Since going full-time as a stand-up in 2010, sometimes he’d drive 250 miles to play a gig for 250 bucks. On the road, he’d often eat tuna straight from the can. Stayed at dodgy motels where he feared for his life. Off the road, he lived in a Nashville attic apartment with no insulation, freezing during the winter and in the summer sweating like a sex worker in Sunday school.

“Yeah,” Slay, who is 41 years old, tells AL.com, “there were plenty of unglamorous things. You’re working for years for basically no money, just hoping this turns into something one day. I don’t think my wife and kids would enjoy it if I were still making that kind of money. But for me at the time, I was like, this is what I want to be doing. I’m traveling the country in my car with 317,000 miles when I traded it in, zipping all over and leaking oil, and I loved it.”

“Workin’ Man” premiered Jan. 16. In it, Slay riffs on subjects ranging from country-music to cigarettes to his reluctance to tuck in his shirt.

Today, Slay checks in for a phoner from a hotel in Huntsville, where he’s playing a run of shows, two of which have sold-out already, at comedy club Stand Up Live. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Dusty, since you’ve been sober since 2012, I was wondering how you celebrated your Netflix special’s premiere?

Dusty Slay: I was supposed to go to New York City. But we had the snowstorm of the century in Nashville, and my flight got canceled, so I went home. My neighbor was having a watch party with some of the other neighbors, and I live in a great neighborhood and we’re all friends.

I took my kids and my wife, and we all went to my neighbor’s house and then they put the special on. And in a way, the special – I filmed it in May and then it just came out on Netflix – I’m far enough away from it and I’ve been doing new jokes — I’ve got a new hour [set] that I’m doing [at live shows] — that it was like I was watching a comedian that I’m just very familiar with. And it was fun.

I ended up watching the whole special there with my neighbors, which is something I never thought I would do: Watch myself for an hour with my friends. It was a fun celebration to have my kids there and my neighbors and just be like, hey, look at this cool moment that I’m having.

Dusty Slay is your real name, correct?

It is my real name. I mean, some could argue that my name is a little different on my government paperwork, but I’ve always been called Dusty Slay by my parents and everyone.

With a name like that, it seems like you’d be predestined to be a pro wrestler. Who are some entertainers you’ve drawn inspiration from who aren’t comedians?

Well, you bring up wrestling, and I grew up watching wrestling, or “wrastlin’” as I called it. I don’t know when I started calling it wrestling and stopped calling it wrastlin,’ yet it happened at some point in my life. I grew up watching that, you see all those [pro wrestling] promos, and all those guys are talking — I mean, that’s really cool stuff.

I also grew up listening to country music. I love country and that’s where I get a lot of inspiration from. Merle Haggard is very famous for doing working-man songs.

In the early 2000s, I had a real weird stage. I was reading poetry books, and I found [hard-living writer] Charles Bukowski poems, and I was drinking a lot. You had never seen poems like that, where it was real gritty stuff, where he wasn’t rhyming, it was just little short stories. And I’m like, oh, I love this guy.

Speaking of drinking, what’s the biggest way you think being sober has shaped what you do with comedy?

It was just real clarity, and some real self-control and discipline. I mean, that was the thing for me with drinking: I never had control. I was still doing comedy. I was still funny. In fact, I won a competition in Charleston [South Carolina, where Slay resided at the time] as a drinker.

But the moment I quit drinking, I started being able to write jokes better and faster, and I could remember them better.

And just my daily walk was just better in general because as a drinker, I’m always kind of pursuing that next beer. But when you eliminate that, then you’re in pursuit of other things and you need to find other things to bring you fulfillment. And I don’t lose as many friends. [Laughs]

A thing I like about your comedy, you come from a Southern perspective but it’s more everyman and never resorts caricature. Some comics have made a career out of the one-note Southern thing, and they’ve made a lot of people laugh with that. Can you talk about finding the sweet spot there? Being a Southern comic but not leaning into it too much.

Yeah, I mean, I am Southern, right? It’s like, I live in the South, I’ve always lived in the South, and I really like it. I don’t know that you can necessarily be proud of just being born in a geographical area, but if you can, yeah, I am proud of it. I feel like the South is a special place. We’ve got a lot of food traditions and things and, I don’t know, I just love being in the South.

But it’s not my whole being, you know? I like creative, artsy things. So I want to express all those sorts of things that I like, but from my Southern perspective.

My accent, sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. It’s definitely faded a lot over the years. I wish I talked like Matthew McConaughey, but I don’t and I’m not gonna fake it, you know?

But I’m inspired by a lot of things. I’ve traveled all over the country now. There are a lot of great places in this country, and even places growing up that I thought I would never like, I go there, and I’m like, wow, this is a wonderful place. California these days can be the butt of a lot of jokes. But you go to California and like, oh, it’s awesome out here. California is this beautiful state, you know?

How did you pick the city and venue to film your Netflix special “Workin’ Man” at?

I go all over the country, but I feel like the South and the Midwest really understands my jokes the best. But whenever I need to film something, if I’m given an opportunity to film, I usually end up having to go to New York or L.A. I love going to those cities, but I never get to do anything in the South film-wise.

This time it was my choice, so I wanted to do something in the South. And I really like Knoxville. But they don’t have a comedy club, so I never get to go there and do comedy. I thought, well, that’s perfect. My jokes will be fresh to them.

Then, the Bijou Theatre [in Knoxville] came up as an option. It’s a really nice theater and friends of mine, comics, have done the Bijou Theatre a lot and they spoke highly of it.

We sold-out two shows, so I got to do two shows back-to-back, and they were both great. Like, we didn’t have to do things where we go out and we say, “Alright, we need to get you to laugh here just so we can capture some laughter.” We didn’t have to do any of that. The audience was really hot.

Because you never know. I could do a joke 100 times and get a huge laugh and then the day I’m recording, suddenly it doesn’t get a laugh. But the audience was on board all the way. The shows were amazing.

When you’re not doing shows or working on comedy, what do you like to do — besides the usual, spend time with family and friends?

These days, I’ve really got into gardening and outdoor stuff. My dad lives on a farm, and I grew up doing that stuff with him, and, I’ll be honest, I always hated it. Now that I’m older and I’m on airplanes all the time and I’m in cities, when I get home it’s nice to get out on the land. Get my hands in some dirt. Plant a tree. Grow some stuff.

I’m not great at it. I’m not ready to save the planet with my garden. But it is very satisfying to go out and pick a pepper off a plant that I grew and put that in a salad. My daughter, who’s 2-years-old, she’ll go up to the tomato plants and pull a tomato off the tree and just eat it like it’s an apple. And I love seeing that.

What was the moment stand-up comedy hooked you? When you realized this is what you want to do with your life.

For me personally, as a performer, this is what happened. In 2003 or 2004, I did a little stand-up comedy, and I wasn’t very good.

I was making up a lot of things. Just to bring it full circle, I was being trying to be a Southern comic. Look at me, I’m real Southern, right? I was wearing overalls and no shoes to perform. This is all true. And it wasn’t going very well – surprise, surprise — so I quit doing it [stand-up comedy].

And then in 2008, my friend invited me to do a show. He was like, “Why don’t you try comedy again?” So write this bit about letters of the alphabet, and I go out and do this bit — and it’s on YouTube, on my album “Making That Fudge” – but I do it in front of an audience of people. In front of a bunch of comedians that had never heard of me, they would have no reason to ever hear of me. And I really crushed.

I was a drinker at the time, but I didn’t drink that night. I went home after that show, and my body was just buzzing. I just felt so good.

It was a long journey. Every show wasn’t like that, I wasn’t crushing every time, but that hooked me. I was like, I can’t wait to get back up there and do that again, and I’ve had that feeling since that time. Comedy’s just a blast.

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