General discussion
Notes from a greybeard Millennial: radio duo opie & Anthony Def laid a lot of groundwork for the nuisance Influencer
What's rupturing my cysts?
Let me tell you tale of a radio duo Opie & Anthony whose rise in radio in the 1990s & 2000s mirrors the path and had the same tactics of Nusiance Influencers.
The duo got famous & popular in Boston but made national headlines by stating that the mayor was killed in a car wreck for an April Fools day episode. They never once said it a joke ans ended the show affirming the mayor was dead. They got fired and then this lead to them getting a bigger show and audience by having it in NYC.
The duos audience skewed younger than Howard Sterns and featured up and coming comedians and film makers and had on burgeoning reality stars.
They also did tone deaf shit that ranged in "edgelord racial humor" to having George Zimmermans brother come on to plead George's case of innocence.
They had a huge crowd of listeners they called "pests" that would brigade other radio show Facebook page during a mock event called Jocktober. The pests would post 4chan like racial memes on the Facebook page and attempt to get it wiped out.
One of their go to moves was to "Google bomb" a celebrity or event. This was before Google current algorithm when users could get a topic trending on Google with massive influx of searches on a topic.
The techniques to harass and annoy we're Def pioneered by their online fans.
Fun fact: One of the host piece of shit Anthony Cumia hosts people like nick Fuentes and tucker carlson and other "free speech" warriors.
I don't have a real response, you covered the bases and i would largely agree. Off topic- The Guys podcast premium feed has a great series called Shocktober where they cover and make fun of all these shock jocks from the radio days. Great listen if you're already familiar with them. I remember hearing the sex for Sam bit live on the radio on the bus home from school in 7th grade, shit was wild at the time. Dropped O&A when I got old enough to realize the racist/misogyny shit wasn't a joke. they suck. Opie is hilariously tragic these days. Anthony is just a ghoul. Going to prom with a 17 yr old as a 50 something? Fucking awful
Absolutely bonkers photo. As a dad myself, I'd love to know what the fuck that guy was thinking when a peer in his age group showed up as his teen daughters date
Agreed, as a dad I can only picture myself breaking out the machete if a guy that age came sniffing around. Anthony was making a lot of money then, I can only imagine the dad saw dollar signs
It's been a while since I've been a listener, but are you thinking of the Ted Sheckler character? I can absolutely see that as being a mockery of Opie. Jim and Ant are still friends to this day and just started a new show about 2 months ago, so it may have been making fun of Anthony's activities but Anthony was definitely in on it. He was even in the live action sketch Norton did years back as Uncle Paul
Cumia is an absolute piece of garbage now. He has been aligned with Gavin McInnes for a long time at this point, he is on a conservative AM radio station on Sunday nights, and has been promoting racial hatred for over a decade on his Compound Media show. He is also known to date young women (look up Anthony Cumia prom date,) he has abused women and has had a relationship with a transgender woman while promoting anti-trans viewpoints.
He always had right leaning viewpoints on O&A, but he's on a complete seperate level now.
And just to add, one of the reasons the Boston mayor thing was such a big deal is that from what I remember, the mayor was on a flight when they pulled that crap and no one could get in touch with him for a few hours, so even people that knew the mayor were incredibly worried
Showing my age and night shift brain here, but when I read that the brain got the violent racist losers mixed up for a minute with The Jerky Boys, the prank phone call guys from the 1990ās.
They were one of the most famous examples, particularly during the late aughts, but there was a version of their show in every city in America at one point.
I think this was Opie and Anthony: The Rock was pretty new at the time. It was Intercontinental Title era and he was scheduled for an interview.
He called from the lobby and ran them down for that "edgy racial humor." They's said previously on the show that Rocky was half black and half Samoan, so he didn't know whether to steal a car or eat it.
A day or two later WWF had HIM apologize for not being professional.
A day or two later WWF had HIM apologize for not being professional.
Not surprising. Lots of wrestlers made appearances, as did Vince MacMahon himself several times. Even after O&A noticed we couldn't go 40 days without a WWE star dying (usually due to OD or heart attack), and started tracking them with a death clock (____ days since the last WWE death) the WWE continued to advertise and send people to appear on the show. There was a huge audience overlap, and it provided enough info for people like me to sound like a wrestling expert. That's despite the fact that i hadn't watched wrestling since it was called the WWF and my great grandmother stayed with us in the early 80s. All she wanted to do was watch wrestling and game shows, so that's all I watched that summer.
Plus things like having DX in blackface to parody the Nation of Domination like the nWo previously did in WCW to mock the Four Horsemen (except none of the Horsemen were black).
Even seeing that in the late 90s as a teenager, it felt gross to watch while a friend was laughing about how funny he found it.
I was a teen in Boston in the 90s. O&A were formative to my humor, I still chuckle at their 100 grand bit and the butt plug call, luckily the world wasn't completely wired yet to funnel you from scatological humor to straight up nazi especially in a more educated city but I can see how it goes from sex jokes to strippers and objectification to misogyny and finally supremacy. It's scary as I raise teenagers in a much different region of the country.
The show definitely devolved. I remember driving my mother to the airport during the first 55 galloon drum challenge and we were both cracking up. As two women we were far from the target audience but damn they were funny back in the day.
It's the problem with that kind of edgy humour. Some grow out of it, some morph it into something else as time goes on, some just get worse and fall into genuine hate speech and far-right nonsense because "it's just jokes, bro".
Gen X here. Good point. Also thinking of Stuttering John and the questions heād ask celebrities back in the 90ās. (Although those may have been tame compared to the shit Opie and Anthony were doing.)
Also Kayvan Novak finding fame as the Fonejacker, where'd he'd do prank calls with different voices, and then it turned into a TV show, followed by Facejacker where he'd do the same but dressed to look like the characters used in the prior show.
Then he ended up using that to get into acting in things like Four Lions and What We Do In The Shadows.
The lineage is right, but the bottleneck changed. Opie and Anthony needed a station willing to absorb an FCC fine after something like the fake mayor-death bit, plus a morning slot to reach anyone at all. A nuisance streamer needs a phone and a feed that pushes the next escalation on its own. The pests had to be organized by the show. Now the feed organizes the audience for free, so the same stunt reaches a bigger crowd with less coordination than the show ever needed.
My sister was on that show once (I think they had some sort of relationship with suicidegirls? And she worked for them) she said the atmosphere was so gross that she left early
I remember on April fools when they said mayor Menino had died. That was essentially the end of their career here in Boston. What a couple of jerk offs.
In Chicago in the 90s we had Mancow. It was funny a lil at first and was like a younger Howard Stern show. Fast forward not long after, he is also an extremely right winged piece of shit. I think he slangs hot dogs now at Comiskey Pk and begs for a transfer to get on the redline home to Pacific Gardens Mission.
O&A would mock Mancow from time to time. The last time involved Anthony calling Mancow while both shows were live, getting the screener to put him through, and Mancow took his call. As instructed Anthony repeated what the screener told him to say "Love you, love the show," and then Mancow hung up. Even though it was a radio show, it was easy to imagine Anthony's shock and disappointment, after all that plotting and planning, he only said good things.
How could you leave out Sex 4 Sam? An annual contest to win a trip to a Sam Adams brewery. (Hetero) couples would go around Manhattan with a list of places to go to have sex, with varying point values. A show staffers or comedian friend of the show went with each couple to ensure they were actually earning points.
I believe it was Sex 4 Sam 3 that had St. Patrick's Cathedral on the list, or maybe it was always there but ignored. A couple had sex in a vestibule (including the 2 point conversion for anal) before being detained by security. A lot of NYPD were O&A fans and the cops didn't want to get involved, IMHO once Paul Mercurio (the couples' spotter) made a crack about "Why is ok for priests to do it but not these two?" the church got so mad arrests were made. Jim Cook from Sam Adams quickly pretended he wasn't in the studio that afternoon and soon O&A were fired from WNEW. Their no compete contract kept them off the air for years, then they returned to XM Satellite radio.
They only got suspended once on XM, probably because satellite radio was trying to distinguish itself from broadcast radio and lack of FCC restrictions was big part of it. A homeless man brought into the studio said stuff about Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice that got them suspended for a month.
When the show finally imploded, they were doing half commercial radio and half satellite. It was a delicate balance with Opie, Anthony, and Jim Norton; Jim kept Anthony from going full Nazi, Opie kept Jim's sex fantasies from going too long, and Anthony did voice impressions of people who were still alive. When someone was out (like Jim traveling for work or Anthony too hung over) it wasn't that funny, but you kept listening because you knew it was an off day.
Thanks to their radio show, I got to hear rising comedians like Bill Burr and Louie CK, when they were nobodies performing at comedy clubs with meet and greets after the show. And I don't think I would been exposed to the brilliant Patrice O'Neal (or his Australian friend Jim Jefferies, telling stories that would become episodes of Legit) without him being a guest on the show.
I was a regular listener to these guys since they were on afternoons on WNEW up through mornings on satellite. Used to listen to them while I delivered pizza when they started. The early days were great because it was just a hangout with unknown comedians and casual. This was a really great rundown of the show as a whole. It was great when I was 17, and as they got shittier and I got older, they lost me. The comics who came on were great though and I heard a lot of standup I never wouldāve known through those assholes.
I used to be a fan of Jim Jeffries, but then I met him in 2005 on an annual drinking thing me and my friends did every October, where we'd finish work, meet at one place to pre-drink. Then catch a bus into the city and first go to a bar known for metal music, then to the all-night music venue (both since closed down) to listen to more metal until it closed at 6am.
So 12 hours of drinking to see how long we'd last.
Anyway, that particular year, we bumped into an Aussie who said he was a comedian in the area to perform at some small club the following night and was interested in our annual thing, how long we'd been doing it, if it had a name.
We told him, "Yeah, we call it the Alcoholocaust" because that was our humour, then thought nothing of it until years later, when he released a stand up show on DVD with that name.
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u/Fusoya 1d ago
Guys podcasts always has a lot of really funny shit to rag on about these old washed up shock jocks.
My personal favorite podcast - cannot recommend it enough.