The Howard Stern Thread

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Ugh.

i'm not that familiar with pre-satellite stern, so this is just from digging into krock/wnbc stern. also my credibility has been destroyed by not realizing robin wasn't even in the studio.

his megalomania, not at all
his bigotry, i guess so. compared to bits from the 80s and 90s, it wouldn't be hard to look tolerant. the one thing that puts me off about old stern, when i dig into it, is the racist and homophobic shit mostly because it's just the dumbest fucking shit and doesn't fulfill my requirements for comedy, like insight or novelty. there's less bigotry on the show and people like sal that say genuinely racist shit are mocked for their beliefs-- even if the shit sal says would look tame compared to dumb racist shit on oldschool stern. his approach to women over the years has moderated. i think part of this is: divorce + his daughters growing up + beth turning him into a bitch.

on air, i think the change has come not so much from howard's explicit bigotry, which i don't think there was ever a lot of and always seemed insincere but more i think deciding not to keep dudes like jackie around. (what's the difference between jackie doing fag jokes/black people steal tv jokes and artie on high pitch mike?)

i mean... it ain't npr but compared to a lot of the second rate motherfuckers that came after howard and still basically do a version of howard's show and even compared to my local morning zoo, it's pretty tame.

My thought is now that he's part of the establishment, he doesn't have to resort to some of his old tricks. However, there's still some fire left in him. Those moments when he just fucking loses it and yells are magic.

Also he talks about retirement all the time but dude will be in front of a microphone somewhere 'til he dies.

Robin is not back in studio.

― svend, Saturday, June 22, 2013 9:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The tell is that when she misses the cue to come back from a break, Howard doesn't ask the crew if she's in the bathroom or the hallway.

Courtney Love interview from a few weeks ago was supposedly decent, but I didn't get to hear it yet. The last show I heard was the one where Sour Shoes played in the studio which must have been last November.

Scott Thorson interview from last week was good. ZZ Top one worth tracking down.

And actually, look for the Marc Maron interview too. Comedy podcasts are so much a part of my listening, that it's interesting whenever it crosses paths with old-style radio.

His total lack of a working knowledge of pretty much any music always makes me bug out, I listened to one from a couple of weeks ago and Janks was on the phone talking about the Monkees and the R n' R Hall of Fame, they were playing various tracks and Howard was saying 'play that one really psychedelic one Fred, what is it???' and Janks replies Porpoise Song, Porpoise Song, Howard's saying 'Nahh that's not it'.

i would love to see vampire weekend on howard

Anytime Howard gets worked up about the Moody Blues not being in the Rock Hall Of Fame I cringe...

"are you into the drugs? hash oil?"

Back in the DC-101 days, I heard him tell a caller who was complaining about the music selections "look, if I was allowed to pick my own music, you'd have three hours of Zappa on here every morning."

He had a funny segment recently when the subject was the Tony Awards and he made the point that show tunes are not real music because they have no "formula" to them and that he could write a Broadway score in six minutes. He then proceeded to ad-lib an original show tune on the spot. And it actually sounded pretty credible.

i love his fake improvised musicals. the first one that comes to mind is doing his version of george takei's musical after hearing the title.

discussion of paula deen here is hilarious. howard defends her at first then some insane tape is played where she says she's not a racist because she has a small child with her that's "as black as that board over there" about 40:00 in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urkz6gy4eKg

yesterday, i listened to a clip of jimmy breslin on the show, following an incident in which he referred to a korean-american colleague as a "slant-eyed yellow cur," would have been from the summer of 1990. breslin lamely tries to defuse things but still comes off as a cranky old racist piece of shit; howard makes unfunny racist jokes, complains about political correctness gone mad. not a lot of fun.

robin and howard discussing paula deen, i keep hearing artie as ed torian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq3ntmlNVS0

there's a 24/7 stern show shuffle stream online, which seems to go into older material than stern show shuffle material on 100.

right now, i'm listening to fred late the morning after his dial-a-date. some of it's amazing. weird to hear fry from futurama doing racist radio skits.

The recent Larry King/Jerry Seinfeld show was decent, although Howard's 'renowned' interview technique tends to run: ask something ill-informed and challopsy that he read from a Page 6 cutting from 1987, then let the interviewee dissect the wrongness and tiredly explain what actually happened.

right... i do like that he's interested in boring showbiz shit that no other interviewer would ask about... anecdotes about gary shandling, carson and lawrence welk, sign me up.

why was robin out on her boat two nights in a row watching fireworks and can't come to the studio????

crossposted on sfn

steampunk convention steam whistle sound tradio prank call
"i've got a troybilt tiller, i'm asking 300 for it..."
highlight of the morning

howard is trying to hire a swap shop host to do a show on h100. "ass napkin ed can call in and trade with jeff the drunk. that kind of thing. but it'll be a legitimate swap shop."

alright, that's enough. sorry.

Brush with the Law week was lame, who wants to hear phone calls with rapists

why was robin out on her boat two nights in a row watching fireworks and can't come to the studio????

― dylannn, Wednesday, July 17, 2013 6:28 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

show tunes are not real music because they have no "formula" to them and that he could write a Broadway score in six minutes.

this from a guy who loved '80s hair metal, lol

(surely he meant have a formula?)

^I'm sure he said "no formula," but yeah, I think what he meant to say was something like "no definite structure." Like anything you can think of becomes part of the song.

"No form" is probably exactly what he was going for.

I loathe nearly all contemporary B'way, but as with most things cultural, he's an ignoramus.

I think part of the ignoramus routine is schtick.

So he had Whitney Cummings topless in his photo studio. And then she and Beth posed together. Beth with her clothes on I presume.

serious? i bailed after the first hour.

yeah. I usually fast forward past the interviews but I heard the last 5 minutes or so of whitney - that's when the bombshell was dropped.

i can't stand any howard from before ~2005, am i alone

since that's when I heard him, no. He wasn't without entertainment value -- the one thing he knew something about was showbiz -- but even in that realm I always found his ignorance convincing (how boring silent movies, Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, and p much any comics before 1970 were, etc).

Howard Stern being a huge Frank Zappa fan makes, like, the most sense of anything I've ever heard.

i think i'd move my date back to 2000-- listening to an individual show from the 90s is usually okay, actually, but the isolated bits from before 2000 and definitely before, say, 97/98 are hit-or-miss. a lot of the humor is so amateurish and dated and racist and sexist and homophobic (i'm saying this as a guy that recommended clips of artie going in on high pitch mike, but racism and sexism and homophobia 1985-1995 seems like it comes from another planet where black people talk like i dunno amos and andy??? and it feels kind of weird that that stuff is never acknowledged and howard steers well clear of virulently racist shit MOSTLY, esp since artie's been gone.... kinda confusing cause racist shit still does fly but he's still on the air telling an audience of prob mostly white males that zimmerman is a murderer) and just grindingly painfully dumb and unfunny; some of it is amazing: i heard the post-dial-a-date with fred episode for the first time recently, the cookie puss incident, some great old interviews, howard vs. meg griffin, stuttering john trying to evict gange and grillo, billy west, kenneth keith kallenbach. i dunno. the bad from pre-2000 almost balances out the good for me. you've got your stern show shuffle on, digging on kenneth keith kallenbach being interviewed about banging fat girls, his mom is in the studio telling howard he's a bright boy that did well in school, then all of a sudden you're into a homophobic jungle fever parody called bum fever and... i dunno.

TOP 5 HOWARD STERN POPCULTURAL TOUCHSTONES
5. i'm not convinced he has listened to zappa in 2 decades, maybe mad magazine at number 5 or hash oil
4. LARRY SANDERS SHOW
3. MOODY BLUES
2. THREE STOOGES
1. SOUPY SALES

otm!

After JD's stellar performance on Wednesday, I think he should be offered the Artie chair.

The worst thing about 90's and earlier is the relentless CLAPPING, when did it stop and why, does anyone know?

Robin is operating at about 60%. She sounds tired.

I listened to a snippett of old show this morning where they get the results back from a DNA swab and it turns out that Artie is 25% Native American, it was 0_o

Argh Iphone typing

I just listened to a show from June 2012 as if it was a new show and it worked well

Listened to the Gary roast for the first time on the way into work today, it was pretty flat, Greg Fitzsimmonds seemed to be the only comic who could read out loud.

I really don't know why I am still listening. It's the same routine over and over again.