I don’t get Howard Stern. My mind is as filthy as anyone’s but…I just don’t get him. Granted, I’ve never given him much of a chance. Fort Wayne is as far from Stern Country as you can get, but parts of his show used to run on the E! channel, and I think I get the idea. Still don’t get him. But it’s a big country, and there’s lots of stuff I don’t get — “The Passion of the Christ,” Star Wars/Lord of the Rings in general, Tom Clancy novels, books by CEOs. Live and let live, etc.
That said, what’s happening to Howard Stern — the fining by the FCC, which is starting to look like a vendetta — is flat-ass wrong. You can’t argue that the public’s airwaves are being polluted when Stern is so hugely popular with…the public.
Roger Ebert, the hardest-working man in showbiz, gets it about right today, I think.
OK, I just thought of something Stern does that I do think is funny — when he asks Playboy Playmates questions about American history. Sample:
“Who won the Civil War?”
“We did!”
“Who’d we fight?”
“Germany?”
alex said on April 16, 2004 at 3:01 pm
Amen, hallelujah!
One of the funniest stories ever was the station in Florida that dropped Jerry Falwell for having too much graphic sexual content on his show. This was when he was scandalizing Bill Clinton and hawking videotapes featuring Paula Jones.
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Marci said on April 16, 2004 at 11:52 pm
Howard is a genius. It really is too bad that the only stuff folks here in Ft. Wayne get to hear or see of Howard is from his E! show — which generally sucks, by the way. The E! show is really nothing more than a bookend to his radio gig, and doesn’t stand well on its own. I listened to him almost religiously when I lived in DC, and genuinely miss hearing him. His political commentary as well as his comedy bits more than make up for the times when the show is overrun with lipstick lesbian exploitation and naked strippers.
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Marci said on April 16, 2004 at 11:56 pm
Heh. That story you links to talks about Elliot, actually. I listened to him sometimes, when Howard’s show was on the Best Of rotation. He’s definitely waaaay more raunchy than Howard usually is.
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Michael said on April 17, 2004 at 11:00 pm
First, I don’t believe Howard should be taken off the air. Parents have a responsibility to control what their children listen to.
However, I just read the Roger Ebert link you put up.
Roger says, “A listener to Stern will find that he expresses humanistic values, that he opposes hypocrisy, that he talks honestly about what a great many Americans do indeed think and say and do.”
That statement by Ebert is just laughable. I don’t know what Roger’s interpretation of the definition of ‘humanistic’ is, but making retarded people’s troubles entertainment isn’t ‘humanistic’ to me. Howard does that at least once a week.
Howard “opposes hypocrisy”? I find it hard to believe Ebert really listens to Howard.
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