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| Posted By | Discussion Topic: NEW YORKER ARTICLE | ||||
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| mikeWOW | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 4:48 PM |    | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Sep. 00  | Gross Prophets Lesbian catfighters. Blind boxers. Aging strippers. These are a few of radio hosts Opie and Anthony's favorite things. Now they've helped the duo win an estimated $30 million contract to go national. BY IAN SPIEGELMAN "What's going on with the amputee girl?" Anthony Cumia demands during a break in "The Opie and Anthony Show." But neither partner Gregg "Opie" Hughes, nor producer Ben Sparks, nor any of a handful of twentysomething interns and assistants has any idea what's happened to the woman who promised to come in and show off her prosthetic foot. "The last time I spoke to her, she was leaving work," offers a producer the guys call Stinky. "She said she'd be here at five." RELATED LINKS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives Table of Contents Cumia sips a bottle of Budweiser and shakes his head wearily. As he and Hughes face each other across the width of a peninsula-shaped console of switches and dials (at the end of which someone's carved I LOVE ANTHONY), producers run in and out of the cramped studio waving notes in front of their faces. There's a half-hour left on today's show, they've already played bingo with callers' bra sizes, and one of the contestants for the planned "Blind Boxing" bout has canceled. Facing the threat of some outrage-free airtime, Cumia and Hughes grudgingly allow a time-ravaged stripper named Sandy Kane into the studio to perform a raunchy ballad. They're forced to bleep out several forbidden phrases, and Hughes warns, "We're gonna let you try it one more time, but if we have to dump out again, we're all going to throw stuff at you." When she makes it through the number, a twisted love song for Jerry Seinfeld, Hughes shrugs: "Let's throw stuff at her anyway." Kane freezes before the mike as all five guys in the studio begin hurling audiocassettes, half-filled bottles of water, and copies of Black Tail magazine at the wall just past her head. Sparks is frantically picking up after his bosses, as an overstimulated Hughes lifts his office chair over his head and smashes it to the floor. Red-faced and sweaty, with ten minutes to go, Hughes and Cumia are about to resort to the day's second game of Bra Bingo when in walks Emma, a lithe 20-year-old in a T-shirt, cargo pants, and Adidas shell-toes. "Hey, Emma," Hughes chirps. "You are hot!" Emma snaps off her leg below the knee, removes the sneaker and sock, and places it on the console. "Hey -- it's like a real leg," says Cumia. "Only it's not." The guys gaze at the limb with childlike awe. "You said there were fake toes and stuff," Cumia complains. "That's my spare," Emma says. "The foot flew off the other one. It was pretty funny until I realized I couldn't walk." Then she tells them that the car accident that cost her the lower part of her leg also left her clinically dead for several minutes. "Was there a tunnel and light and all that?" Cumia asks. "If there was I don't remember because they gave me so much morphine." "What kind of death is that?" Cumia says, laughing. "You got gypped." Giggling, Emma tells them she wanted to come in and show them that she's "very all right with it -- I think it's hilarious." Hughes and Cumia couldn't agree more and invite her to come back on the show another day when there's more time. "I just love you guys!" she coos. "Some people will say it's terrible, but you know what?" Hughes says earnestly, off the air. "One-legged people have a sense of humor. Blind people want to have fun. We're just trying to have fun and include everyone." "They want to be involved," says Cumia. Those getting involved include busty "catfighters;" a ventriloquist whose dummy can't stop shrieking, "Burn your meat curtains with a crack pipe;" and actor Jay Mohr, who offers ribald impressions and a target for jokes about his career woes. Popular running gags include "Whip 'Em Out Wednesday," when Opie and Anthony encourage female fans to expose their breasts to cars with WOW bumper stickers; "F-U Friday," when callers rant about everything from traffic to cheating wives; and "Cripple Bouts," a series of fights between physically challenged listeners held right inside the WNEW studio. (The name of the latter was changed from "Battle Crips" after the show received calls from people claiming to be upset gang members.) In between stunts, they ponder possible double entendres in Judas Priest lyrics now that former front man Rob Halford has come out as gay, and howl at a recording of Chris Burke, the actor with Down Syndrome who played Corky on Life Goes On, singing a Beatles song. If it makes people uneasy to hear someone with Down Syndrome sing, it makes them laugh when others are willing to join in. Hughes and Cumia call it "cringe radio." If you were a better person, you wouldn't laugh, but you're not, and, anyway, where's the beer? To critics, "The Opie and Anthony Show" is a cultural nightmare of sexism, racism, and homophobia, complete with frequent uses of the word "fag." "It's called dark humor," says Cumia. "We're human beings, and sometimes we find things that are wrong funny. Sometimes we find tragedy funny, and that's the way we've always been. We haven't advanced to the point where we're Vulcans." Hughes and Cumia are used to explaining themselves, since a lot of the laughter on the show is thick with the meanness that can surface when working-class white guys fed up with political correctness get together to blow off steam. Though Cumia says "it's not done out of hatred," their free-for-all rap sessions invite callers to indulge their basest, nastiest impulses. After playing a taped "F-U" call on the air, Hughes decides the caller's rant, which compares summer school students to "monkeys climbing around on buses," crosses the line and orders a producer to tone it down for future use. When talking about women, Hughes and Cumia often warn their audience to "be cool," as though they're afraid listeners might cross the line from inappropriate laughing into inappropriate touching. To Cumia, it's just "regular guys hanging out," and, indeed, much of the show is spent reacting to wisecracks that come in by phone, fax, and Internet messages that flash on flat-panel monitors hanging from the studio's ceiling. "The lesbians and all that," he says, " are what we like to call the attention-getters." If there's an adult on the show, it's Hughes, at 36 the younger of the two. Cumia, 38, dominates blocks of the program with manic celebrity impressions -- Mike Tyson, Regis, Captain Quint from Jaws -- as Hughes works the control panel and feeds him ideas. In performance mode, Cumia constantly flicks his head around like he's searching for some invisible object; his wiry body even seems to vibrate when he's not doing anything at all. When he's not cackling, Hughes, who still resembles the Ron Howard character from whom he got his nickname, has two expressions: thoughtful and weary "i hate people that dont get it!" | ||||
| Tequila Fez claims this land in the name of Portugal! Why worry about the train if it never makes it around the tracks?? IrishAlkey wuz here!!! | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 4:51 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Veteran Registered: Jan. 01 | Mike next time do a search look at me AOL/AIM - oanda1027fm | ||||
| barch97 BBTB The barch gots lots a dick I kind of enjoy my anonymity on the board WOW Forum Ambassador | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 4:52 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Veteran Registered: Jul. 00 | uh... There's another page: http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5084&position=2 Long Live the "Syndication Underground" | ||||
| hornygoatweed I've Got A Vagina With Teeth. G.O.O.F.B.A.H.G.S. Dragoon Battalion My friends call me Weed | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 5:07 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Jan. 01 |  Silent Game has enrolled in summer school. Theres still one seat open! Email me here or AIM me at Organic999 to enroll. | ||||
| mikeWOW | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 5:51 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Sep. 00 | sorry boys. i didnt search "i hate people that dont get it!" | ||||
| Roger | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 7:19 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Oct. 00 | quote: Who in the world could have done a silly thing like that?  "One girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat." ~ Garland 'The Marietta Mangler' Greene "Hand me the keys, you cocksucker!" "In English, please?" "Excuse me?" "In English." "Hand me the fucking keys, you cocksucker, what the fuck?" | ||||
| WhackBagKid TALK TO ME, GOMEZ. HE WHO IS #1. | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 8:04 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Sep. 00 | so the New Yorker and New York Magazine, printed the same article, thats weird Webmaster of the Undergound Unofficial I Hate adolescentmasturbator Message Board | ||||
| Dryblood | posted on 08-14-2001 @ 8:09 PM | | |||
| O&A Board Regular Registered: Sep. 00 | quote: I was wondering the same thing, must be some Sandie Kane!....;)  Strapped in the chair of the city's gas chamber Why I'm here I can't quite remember The surgeon general says it's hazardous to breathe I'd have another cigarette but I can't see Tell me who you're gonna believe - Guns N' Roses | ||||
Displaying 1-8 of 8 messages in this thread. |