Howard Stern

I'm not really sure when it was that Howard Stern became un-funny. Many people who were former listeners that I speak to claim it was round about the time he got divorced. That might or might not be the case, however. What might actually be the case is that he really wasn't that funny to begin with, but since he was shocking and I was younger (I've been listening to him since approximately 1985 when he was the afternoon guy at WNBC ), he seemed funnier than he actually was. That said, he has become extraordinarily trite to me. I still find his celebrity interviews mildly amusing, but that's pretty much where it begins and ends. The only comedic bit that I can think of that was drop-dead funny in recent memory was "The World's Meanest Listener" contest, where listeners sent in tapes of themselves ripping into whatever member of Stern's staff they so chose. Stern himself was not excluded from the contest, and some of the most brutal insults came his direction from some of the tapes that were sent in. But that was the last time. Recently Stern has been hoisting himself as a free speech advocate and a quasi-martyr for the cause. Jeff Koyen of the New York Press does a pretty conclusive deconstruction of Stern in his latest column. It's worth reading, and to my mind, all true. You can read it here.