#Howard stern ronnie lets hear it movie#
#Howard stern ronnie lets hear it series#

Sometimes it’s when Howard is at his most outrageous that I suddenly realize he’s also accomplishing something strangely moving and human.”įor years, Stern was an integral part of the lives of millions of New York-area commuters whose time in their cars he made not just bearable but fun. I can testify that it’s possible to feel both ways at the same time. “Some,” I wrote in 2009, “might find Howard’s humor at their expense cruel others might consider it radically inclusive.

#Howard stern ronnie lets hear it movie#

But he soon dropped the music entirely and instead spent his air time jabbering with his co-host and newswoman, Robin Quivers engaging in gut-busting, and often exceedingly puerile, exchanges with his stand-up comic sidekicks, Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling (1986–2001), and, later, Artie Lange (2001–2009) relentlessly mocking his supposedly slow-witted producer, Gary Dell’Abate, and other members of his staff, who appeared regularly on the air making prank phone calls playing profane song parodies taking calls from (and often getting into protracted arguments with) listeners welcoming fans into his studio to take part in small-penis contests, Lesbian Dial-a-Date, and other such tomfoolery and, since his show’s blue humor kept away most A-list movie stars, interviewing such offbeat recurring guests as aspiring showbiz nonentity Mark Harris (a youngish gay man who had wed the aged movie actress Martha Raye), Playboy cover girl Jessica Hahn (who’d won fame in the Jim Bakker sex-abuse scandal), and edgy comedians like Sam Kinison, Pat Cooper, Bob Levy, and Yucko the Clown (a foul-mouthed character created by comic Roger Black) and checking in by phone with members of the “Wack Pack”-a grab-bag of devoted fans, most physically or mentally disabled, whose lives revolved around Stern and whose eccentricities he milked for laughs.

When he first came to New York, Stern was mostly a DJ-a spinner of Top 40 records. The salary hike reportedly made Stern the highest-paid performer in show business, won Sirius millions of new subscribers, and before too long, sure enough, led to the absorption of a faltering XM into the behemoth that is now Sirius XM.įourteen years later, Stern can still be heard on Sirius-but much of what his listeners now hear doesn’t sound much like the Howard Stern of yore. In 2006, when Sirius and XM were competing to dominate the new medium of satellite radio, Sirius offered Stern a gigantic sum to be the centerpiece of its extremely wide range of programming, from the Catholic Channel to OutQ (for gays).

(Meantime, WNBC-AM went rapidly downhill and, in 1988, was shuttered, along with the rest of NBC’s radio division.) Over the years, Stern’s show got syndicated to other major North American markets, and for a time, highlights from each day’s show were aired the same evening on the E! television network.

Stern was promptly snapped up by another Big Apple station, WXRK-FM, or K-Rock, and during the next two decades served as its spectacularly popular morning man. Stern garnered big ratings-but, after three years, was fired by executives at 30 Rock who felt he was tarnishing the Peacock Network’s brand.

#Howard stern ronnie lets hear it series#

In 1982, after a series of increasingly high-profile radio gigs in suburban Westchester, Hartford, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., a scrawny, long-haired, 6’5”, 28-year-old Long Island native named Howard Stern, who had gained notoriety for his naughty-boy japery, was summoned to New York, the nation’s biggest radio market, to be the afternoon drive-time man at WNBC-AM, which then was NBC’s flagship radio station.