June 25, 2009 | 7:23 pm

Meet the Beatles!

Posted by Rob Eshman

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After I wrote the blog entry on Howard being the anti-Carson, I realized another way in which he turned the Tonight Show template on its head: Robin Quivers.

Where Johnny had a sidekick, Ed McMahon, whose job was solely to applaud everything Carson said, Howard found a partner who could turn on him any second, and stand up to him, and call him an idiot when need be.  Ed was Johnny’s consort. Robin is Howard’s conscience.

McMahon was complimentary, Robin is complementary.  Ed was there to reflect Johnny’s “greatness” to us, to amplify it, to laugh at every joke, to nod at every question.  Whenever I watched the show, I always wondered: How is that a job for a grown man?  He leveraged the exposure into more work and millions of dollars—all to his credit—but on the show itself he was a highly paid pet.

When Howard had the chance to find his foil, he must have had thoughts of Ed McMahon in mind— Ed was the uber-sidekick of the Boomer generation… but Howard ran the other way.  He didn’t discover Robin, but when she was brought to him, he had the insight to see why she would be integral to the show, and he had the genius to stick with her after the two were fired and separated. It wasn’t just loyalty—he knew without Robin, he might just end up with another Ed.

When I started listening to the show, Robin annoyed me.  That laugh.  That high rolling whinny.  I couldn’t hear a thing beyond that.  But after a few listens, I heard her voice, and it is sharp and funny, angry and independent.  Some of the best show moments are their arguments.  When she’s not on the show, the magic goes out of the room. I can only compare it to….

…the Beatles.

I was listening to Howard talk about his last interview with Paul McCartney, about how much the Beatles meant to him, and it dawned on me that he has, on his show, recreated the band. Great comedy, the experts say, is musical—comedy has a rhythm.  Howard the DJ knows music as well as anyone, is passionate about music.  The band he started as teenager became the show he created as an adult, but the model for him, the ideal, will always be the Beatles.

And so:

Howard is John.  The wit, the vision, the poet.

Robin is Paul. The feminine voice. The humanizer.

Fred is Ringo (but only in the good ways). Fred is so clearly the rhythm maker of the show. His sound effects punctuate some stories, provide a backbeat to other, a counterpoint to still more. After listening to the show for 16 years, I have a Pavlovian response to Fred’s drops—if someone says the word “fun,” for instance, and Fred doesn’t do the Billy Crystal drop, I tense up, just waiting…. 

Artie is George. The lyrical comedy that weaves in and out of the music.  There…gone…there…gone. 

It took four players to make the Beatles, and the genius of Howard—for all his reputation of egotism and superstar me me me status—is that he understood that The Howard Stern Show wouldn’t, couldn’t and doesn’t work with only Howard Stern.

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June 24, 2009 | 6:29 pm

Reality Should Bite

Posted by Rob Eshman

I don’t want to belabor the point, but here’s another clue that Howard Stern and Larry David are cut from the same shmata:  oral hygiene.

In the Esquire interview with Larry David this month,  reporter Scott Raab notices that David whips out a bottle of breath spray after eating some room service white bean humus:

SR: What’s the garlic content like on the hummus?
LD: Oh, do they put a lot of garlic in the hummus?
SR: It depends on the hummus. Some hummus is very garlicky.
LD: I can’t tell. I better stop eating it.
SR: I shouldn’t have said anything about garlic.
LD: You ruined the whole thing for me.
SR: What is that?
LD: Breath tonic.
SR: It’s called Breath Tonic?
LD: Yeah. That’s what it’s called — Breath Tonic.
SR: You get it at Ralphs?
LD: It’s from a health-food store. Most people are completely unaware of their breath. They violate your space, they have no idea that they have halitosis.
SR: Is this something I need to think about?
LD: No. No. But I’m surprised how few people actually think about it.
SR: I do think about it.
LD: Do you? I’m a little obsessed with it, I have to say.

On yesterday’s show, Howard spent a good five minutes discussing how, to quote David,  “Most people are completely unaware of their breath.”  Except he wasn’t quoting David.

This is from the show rundown, provided by Marksfriggin.com, which is a remarkable and telling web site (does anyone in the world bother to provide a minute-by-minute account of what Ryan Seacrest is saying?)

Another caller said he was just in the middle of brushing his teeth. Howard said he’s noticed a lot of people who have shitty breath and it’s like they ate a shit sandwich before talking to him. He said it’s unbelievable….

…Howard said there are so many people walking around so unevolved. He said it has nothing to do with income level either. He said it just takes some time to take care of your teeth.

I found this so entertaining,  in the same way I find Curb Your Enthusiasm entertaining.  People don’t dwell on this stuff in public.  Over the years Howard has spoken in great and minute detail over every body part and function: from proper wiping techniques (not in relation to windows) to a long, ongoing segment about his producer Gary Dell’abate’s penile stent.  (He was doing that long before Larry David first came to us in the guise of Seinfeld’s George Costanza, and reappeared in Curb).

Again, it’s taking what’s private and making it public. It’s talking about what we’ve been told polite people don’t talk about.  It’s constantly pricking at even the smallest and most insignificant social conventions, until the foolishness of society becomes apparent, and a new idea for a better society can take hold.

Yes, it’s humor that, at its root, wants to make the world better.

Is that overkill?  I don’t think Howard (or Larry David, or Woody Allen) would ever express it that way (for one, it’s not funny) but I do believe that impulse, that value system,  informs their comedy. It’s explicit in Jewish comedians like Mort Sahl,  Lenny Bruce and Bill Maher, they were and are on a crusade to make the world better.  Howard, Larry and Woody would never admit or even think to say they’re on a crusade (again, not very funny), but that’s at least one impulse behind their humor.  It’s not just funny, it’s comedy with a purpose.  It’s meaningful comedy.

Whatever the impulse, the effect is the same: the world is a better place because of them.  Media influences society, and the media landscape pre-Howard was more full of dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The greatest single contribution of Howard Stern to society—all the laughter aside—was to lower the B.S. factor. 

Even today, in a world saturated with reality shows and YouTube, he still does this.

Howard rightly gives himself credit for helping to create the reality show idea, but the truth is he doesn’t give himself enough credit.  Reality shows have taken a cue, or sometimes an exact idea, from him, but they don’t dare reflect reality to the extent he does. 

Here’s a Howard Stern reality show from this week: Take some random homeless guy, ask him questions, and bet on what he knows.  No editing, no careful casting. 

Here’s another one: a welfare washout, mentally borderline pathetic loser named High Pitch Eric calls in—he’s a regular guest on the show—and he begs Howard for $100.  Howard refuses to lend him the money. It’s clearly the wrong thing to do.  (Then again, using someone who is mentally impaired for our driving entertainment is already questionable, so what’s another 100 bucks?)  What follows is a debate over whether Eric will ever pay back the money.  Howard finally lends it to him, because he wants to prove that despite all of Eric’s promises to pay the money back by Tuesday, the $100 is as good as gone.  Now that’s a cliffhanger.

In other words, Howard still presents a much more raw and unvarnished world to his audience than so-called reality shows.  His inclination is against artifice—not just because his audience expects that of him, but because that’s what interests him.  If your impulse is to improve the world by laying it bare, you won’t settle for what passes as “reality” on TV.  Reality should bite. 

That’s why on today’s show Howard opposed the idea of Artie Lange doing his own reality show.  (He didn’t say, “I’m against it,” but he only raised the negatives—figure it out.)  The producers as Lange described them want to capitalize on his propensity to overeat, overdrink,  overmedicate and thus overreact. 

There are a hundred great Artie show possibilities, but that isn’t one of them.  And Howard opposed it because it reeks of artifice and set-up—everything his kind of humor, and his kind of career,  stands against.

Meanwhile, I went out and bought the breath spray Larry David recommended.  It’s good.  It’s really good. 

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June 23, 2009 | 3:00 pm

“Here’s NOT Johnny!”

Posted by Rob Eshman

So last night I broke the news to my family that I was writing a Howard Stern blog. My wife looked at me with a mix of pity, patience and dismay—it was the look you give a ten year-old caught with a Penthouse at school. It’s not like he hurt anybody, but still, could he…just…not.

“Good morning, Howard’s bitch,” she chirped when she woke up this morning. In a loving, funny way.

I remind her that there are things she admires in Howard too: those interviews. His ability to tell a story.  My wife is from Brooklyn.  A good story to her is more precious than gold. She laughed until she cried listening to Howard describe how his overprotective mother, Rae Stern, raised him “like a veal,”  taking his rectal temperature until he was what, 46?  She can even do an imitation of Howard imitating his mother’s voice (why Cartoon Network hasn’t asked Howard to do that voice as a character I don’t know. Here’s the pitch: Howard’s “Rae”  and the Midwest matron that Richard Christy voices in his crank calls meet cute at Penn Station and end up… I don’t know, that’s what the geniuses over at Cartoon Network need to figure out). 

I also remind her (defensively) that I am not a Howard fanatic. (I explained to her that there’s a fan site, Marksfriggin.com, that gives a blow-by-blow recount of the show, every show, every day.  I could see her wheels spinning—would I become that obsessed?  Would I end up in a Venice ally, shushing my unwashed children as I struggled to get reception on the one possession the marshal couldn’t pry from my hands… my Sirius radio receiver?

The truth is: I’m normal.  I listen to Howard on the way to and from work. I switch between him and NPR. I never think to listen to him at work or at home— though I will sit in the driveway to hear the end of a good segment. I will scan Howardstern.com to see what I missed. That’s it. Maybe 20 minutes a day, max.  When he used to be on commercial radio, half that—the commercials were endless (now I just lose a few minutes as my satellite radio reads “updating channels” or “acquiring signal”—does Sirius credit me for that?  Shouldn’t it?  Does it have any money left to credit me?  Can I get it in 25 cent stock vouchers? Is Sirius still around?)

I don’t think I’m that unusual. Howard’s image is that he attracts freaks, washouts and lowlifes, but his demo is professional and educated. (Someone else can actually research and post his demo info to buttress my point— please—we go to press today). I can tell just by the quality of people who e-mailed me yesterday after hearing Howard mention my name. A wealthy home builder.  A graphic designer for The New Yorker. A college-educated housewife. A lawyer. We’re all in the closet, but we’re all there.

I started listening when I started working at the Journal, 16 years ago. (Ouch.)

And here is why I kept listening, why we all do: there hasn’t been one single day in 16 years when the show doesn’t make me smile on the way to work.  I can be tired.  I can be sick of my job.  I can be in the middle of a spat. I can have a million things on my mind.  But the words flow out of the radio, and sooner or later, I will catch myself…

…laughing.  Laughing in my car, at the radio.  Sometimes even out loud.  I’ve paid 10 bucks and sat through many a two hour comedy movie and never cracked a single smile. But Howard gets me there guaranteed, every day.  Making someone smile on the way to the job—that is doing God’s work. That is hard. Every weekday, for 16 years.  That’s why I started this blog: entertainers who do a lot less get taken a lot more seriously, get fawned over and venerated. (Did someone say Bob Hope? Jerry Seinfeld?)  Respect must be paid…..

Anyway, on to a thought inspired by today’s show: 

I heard Howard speaking about Ed McMahon, who died today.  He gave McMahon his due, pointing out that no other sidekick ended up with so long and lucrative career, even if he did blow it all in his dotage. 

“I never really liked Johnny,” Howard said.

That explained so much: I didn’t like Johnny either.  Never did.  If I could be blunt, he was, in a word, goyishe. Whitebread.  Tame. If he ever got wild, it was a tiresome, aren’t-we-naughty WASPy kind of letting loose.  The only time I liked the show is when they had on Robert Klein, Carlin or any of the then-young comedians, or the alter kokers like Rickles and Dangerfield, who weren’t afraid to ruffle Carson up.  The show was relentlessly safe until and unless those guys showed up.

It struck me that you could read The Howard Stern Show as a kind of reaction to The Tonight Show.  I imagine Howard as a young man watching the Tonight Show and muttering to himself, “This is bullshit.”  Nobody’s always that happy.  In life, every line isn’t an applause line. Johnny’s up there being suave and cool but we know he’s smoking and drinking and screwing around and thinking how he could give two shits about Steve and Edie’s newest tune or Burt Reynold’s latest comedy. Howard has gone a long way to introduce a different model of talk show to the world.  He pioneered the idea that what people laugh at privately they will laugh at publicly. 

The Christian Right calls Howard the anti-Christ, but really he’s the anti-Carson. There will always be a market for milquetoast, for the “Here’s Johnny!” crowd, but Howard realized that there must be millions of people like him, people who kept Mad magazine and National Lampoon in business, people who suffered Carson to get to Rickles, who found the bloopers funnier than the show, who wished the bloopers were the show, people who yearned to hear, “Here’s NOT Johnny!”

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June 22, 2009 | 4:25 pm

Allen David Stern

Posted by Rob Eshman

I went to see Woody Allen’s movie “Whatever Works” yesterday, watching Larry David do Woody Allen on screen.

Only Richard Corliss in Time magazine got it right.  This is a terrific movie.  Kenny Turan at The LA Times,  Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, the guy in The New York Times, especially Benjamin Ivry in The Forward— they should apologize for their reviews of this movie. The audience applauded at the end. At the screen. They knew no one up there could hear them, and they still troubled themselves to clap. Believe me, that wasn’t happening over at “The Proposal.”

So go see it.  And if you’re a Stern fan, you’ll sit there and be struck at how much the David/Allen character reminds you of Howard.  It could only have been more perfect if Woody had named the character Allen David Stern.

Woody Allen. Larry David. Howard Stern.  Allen David Stern.

They are, when you think about it, one man.

Sons of battered immigrants, marinated in mother guilt, fascinated and fearful of the outside world, sickly ambitious and hence resolutely disciplined and productive, heavily therapized, prone to anhedonia …

…And funny as shit.

It always bothered me when Stern railed against Woody Allen.  It felt like the folks were fighting. That was back when Allen left Mia Farrow for her step-daughter (CORRECTION: adopted daughter) Soon Yi.  I got the sense Stern was not just legitimately outraged by Allen’s behavior, but that he was personally friendly with Farrow (Stern-the-professional clearly has a web of personal entertainment industry connections that play into how Stern-the-entertainer reacts on air.)

To me, it felt like fratricide, like the scene in Avalon when the two uncles couldn’t sit at the same table (“YOU CUT THE TURKEY!!!”)  After all, Stern and Allen are two men who couldn’t be more similar in their backgrounds, their humor, their brilliant use of satire, and their impact on the larger culture.  Then comes Larry David, the third musketeer. Call them the latter day Marx Brothers, except they’re not Groucho, Harpo and Chico,they’re Groucho, Groucho and Groucho.  They’re not the Three Stooges, they’re Moe, Moe, and Moe.

Like Groucho and Moe, they’re the big brothers, the leaders, the ones who at the end of the day need only their brains, words and wit.  Each of them is, as Larry David’s character in Whatever Works says, “a man with a huge worldview.”

It’s the worldview of the eternal outsider, no matter how much fame and money and critical success they achieve.  It’s how come on today’s show, when Howard was interviewing Lydia Hearst, the model/actress/heiress to the Hearst fortune, and he asks her what kind of provisions her parents have set out in her trust fund, he quickly adds, “Obviously, no Jews, right?”

That’s the humor of someone who no matter how much they’ve arrived, will never fully feel like he’s arrived.

Thank God.

And thank God for our culture Allen David Stern has a son, and his name is Sasha Barron Cohen.

.

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June 19, 2009 | 8:14 pm

The Greatest Media Interviewer?

Posted by Rob Eshman

Just a clarification. As much as my wife tells me to turn off Howard whn she gets into the car— “Enough already with the Howard!”—she listened to every word of his Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, Francis Ford Coppola and other big name interviews.  I thought of that today as I heard the replay of his Jack Black interview from earlier this week.  Click on any station this week and you’ll see Black answering such hard hitting and revealing questions as, “Tell us about you movie.”

But Stern follows his own curiousity.  He wanted to know why Tenacious D, Black’s self-created rock star character, was such a bomb.  Stern’s fans know he will almost always push a celebrity into uncomfortable areas, where a star’s humanity will have to emerge out from under the pile of public relations manure. There are exceptions: one glaring one was that he didn’t ask Coppola about Godfather 3.  (Did he not dare?  Was he cautioned not to?  Did he figure that in the scheme of things how important was one screw up?  And time spent talking about Godfather 3 was time robbed from talking about Coppola learning about masturbation, or growing up with polio. Anyway, this isn’t the Howard Stern-Is-Perfect Blog). 

But the interview with Black did go into the discomfort zone. From the Howard Stern official web site show wrap up:

Howard asked how Tenacious D was doing, so Jack laughed that the rock duo’s movie was a bomb: “It was a big flop. Zero people went to see it…I was devastated because I was going around town telling people how awesome it was going to be.”  Jack confessed that the movie’s failure ended his writing career

You may, like my wife, despise the stripper routines and fart jokes, but I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head why Stern is arguably the best celebrity interviewer in broadcast media:

1. He listens.
2. He’s genuinely curious.
3. He pushes where others back away: into sex, into money, into the stuff the non-celebrities among us deal with all the time.
4. It’s a team effort: Fred’s sound effects and info; Robin’s questions; Arties anecdotes and jokes.  One of the reason the show succeeds is that it’s built around four personalities, not one. (Much more on this in a later blog).
5. He’s not afraid to be despised. It’s part of his appeal.  If he clicks with a guest, he wins.  If he doesn’t, he wins.
6. He plays to his audience, not his guests.
7. He’s on Sirius satellite radio, so he’s not bound by infantilizing FCC language and content rules, or too constrained by commercial breaks.

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June 18, 2009 | 8:14 pm

Super-elongated C————-

Posted by Rob Eshman

So yesterday I posted my first Stern blog, put my computer to sleep, went down to my car and turned it on.  The first words I heard out of the radio were: “Super elongated [female body part].”

I had to laugh. Here I was trying to describe Stern in the most elevated terms, dedicating a whole blog to understanding his critical impact on culture—and then he smacks me in the face with a super-elongated….

Turns out I tuned in at the exact moment he was discussing the sex change operation that Chastity Bono, Cher’s daughter, is about to undergo.

Here’s where Stern differs from the rest of the media pack that has covered the lurid story.  First, he stakes out a position. He’s a Jew and he has an opinion. I’ve listened to the show long enough to know that he has a knee-jerk rant against sex change operations. “The doctors who do these things should be locked up,” he says. He calls it mutilation. He says the same about circumcision (he has three daughters, so he never had to face the choice).

Then, after giving his opinion, Stern demanded details.  Exact details.  How do they form her organs into his.  A skin graft?  A bone transplant?  Does it have sensation? Can it be used like an authentic one.

Keep in mind Stern’s on Sirius now, so there’s no FCC regulation.  This is adults speaking to adults, using adult words.  Stern is unafraid to be graphic in the pursuit of information, and as difficult as it is to hear, it is fascinating.  That’s one Stern attribute: He doesn’t look away.  Most of the media draws us in to a topic especially for its lurid value, but then takes a polite step back.  If Stern has a transsexual on the show, he has the woman pull down her pants and has someone describe, in detail, what’s doing.  “Nothing human is strange to me,” the Roman poet Terence wrote.  The truth is, almost everything human is strange to us, and Stern forces us to look.

And laugh.

I get in the car this morning and Stern is still talking Chastity.  This time he is getting a report from one of his reporters, Lisa G (née Glasberg), who he sent out to investigate how exactly a sex change operation works. She reports back that it involves clipping a ligament, freeing up a woman’s sexual part, adding a kind of prostheses, creating a sort of robo-penis. The gang on the show cracks some jokes about it.
It’s so awful, Stern concludes, you gotta believe no one would choose to go through this if they didn’t have to.  Same with choosing to be gay, he says.

And here is where Stern’s talent really impresses me, and where society underestimates him: by going deep on Chastity Bono, he has just educated his audience, brought a hidden and shamed world into the light, laughed about it—used humor and information to foster tolerance.  We fear what we don’t know, we hate what we don’t understand.  Stern’s show goes a long way, among a wide demographic, to reducing that ignorance.

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June 17, 2009 | 7:56 pm

“Enough With the Howard!”

Posted by Rob Eshman

Warning: No matter what your opinion of Howard Stern, this blog will offend you.

If you’re not a Howard Stern fan, you’ll wonder why anybody is wasting time writing about someone the media often portrays simply as a foul-mouthed shock jock.

Or, as my wife said last night, “You think that guy is way more important than he is. Enough with the Howard.”

I mean, what kind of show celebrates Father’s Day by giving away a free double “date” with what I’ll euphemistically call a working mom and her equally working daughter. (I got the impression, as I often do, that even some cast members, like Fred Norris, like Howard, didn’t approve. It was wrong. It was bizarre. It was compelling.).

And if you are a Stern fan, you’ll wonder why this blog veers so often toward the serious. Howard’s about giggles and strippers and midgets, right?  If the show were meant to be taken seriously, it wouldn’t offer up mom and daughter hooker teams to married dads.  Who dares to say something serious about that?

Well, I do. And you’re welcome to chime in.

The truth about Howard is that he’s right: he is still, despite his enormous financial success and fame, underrated and neglected as major cultural force.  He is heir of a tradition of outsider satiric comedy that stretches back beyond the shtetl. He is on a pantheon of culture-changers that includes Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Woody Allen and Larry David. As I wrote back in 2004, when the Federal Communications Copmmission was threatening to sue the Stern Show into oblivion:

It isn’t surprising that Stern is caught up in the kind of cultural and political battle in which Jewish comedians and commentators like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce once found themselves.
He is heir to the Jewish tradition of the badchen, or shtetl entertainer. “They were scandalous, filled with gossip,” comedian and frequent Stern guest Richard Belzer has said. “Their essence was to expose and make fun of things in their society. The badchen’s society was the shtetl. We expand it to include the whole society.”
“Stern’s is an unleashed id unrepressed by socially approved feelings,” writes Lawrence Epstein in his seminal study of Jewish comedy, “The Haunted Smile.” “He is an attack on society’s right to censor the honest feels of the individual. He is a safety valve, a release.” In as free and democratic medium that exists, 18 million Americans vote for Stern each morning.
The badchen is what Thomas Cahill might call a “Gift of the Jews,” an outsider who exposes society’s foibles, pokes fun at its hypocrisies, makes people laugh and makes people think…

 

But I digress.  I digress because I get defensive talking about Stern—in polite society people who enjoy his show always have to explain themselves.  After many, many years of starting my morning with Stern, I’m up to the task.  Let the blogs begin.

 

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