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The Howard Stern Show
National Review, 4/7/1997
By Jonathan Foreman
People who hate Howard Stern come from all parts of the ideological spectrum. They include some of my best friends. I myself find him hilarious only about half the time. His fart jokes in particular leave me cold. But you can tell a lot about a man by his enemies. A Stern character was presented in a highly unflattering light on Murphy Brown, and young reporters at the New York Times would like to sentence him to years of sensitivity training. But even the first time I heard his show, in a Philadelphia taxicab, I realized that, on the whole, Howard Stern is a Good Thing. Arriving at my destination I told a law-school colleague about the strange radio personality I had discovered that morning. This man happened to be our class's gauleiter of political correctness, and he immediately launched into a hysterical rant about Stern, one that I've heard many times since and which included adjectives like "disgusting," "racist," and "repulsive."
It is true that Howard Stern could flourish only in a culture as debased and shameless as our own. Yet his success is a sign that many things that seemed lost are still with us. Because, for someone whose sense of humor is awash in adolescent crudeness, Stern is, in his own way, an avatar of wholesome, all-American values.
Certainly he is a rebel against certain forms of piety, but in the way that the Monty Python team were rebels. Had the Pythons worked in radio, surely they too would have come up with the idea of putting a naked women on the air, and with lines like, "The woman sitting next to me is nude. She is not wearing any clothes!"
While his film, Private Parts, is charming, and emphasizes the sweetness and uxoriousness appreciated by all Stern fans, it may signal the beginning of the end of the Stern phenomenon. The essence of Sternism is inseparable from its original medium. And the Howard Stern show is radio's last counterattack against television, with its relentless cult of empty celebrity.
Of course, no television programs are more plastic, bland, and ruthlessly inoffensive than the morning shows with their grinning blow-dried hosts. So it is no coincidence that one of Stern's favorite vendettas is against Kathie Lee Gifford. Nor that some of the show's finest moments have involved Stern's use of "Stuttering John Melendez" as a guided missile against preening celebs. Melendez will infiltrate a flock of journalists tossing easy lobs to someone like Kevin Costner, and then ask a question so ridiculous and insulting that the star will be stunned into silence or even violence.
Unlike its TV competitors, the Stern show is unscripted. Sidekick Robin Quivers will read out stories from the morning papers while Stern makes grumpy or facetious comments. Then he lights upon a topic that captures his imagination and away he goes. In the movie, a pollster explains that those who like Stern tend to listen to the show for one and a half hours, those who dislike him listen for two and a half hours, and both cite a desire "to see what he is going to say next." A listener to Stern enjoys a powerful sense of communion, not only with Stern's team, but with all the other listeners. You could almost be gathered round a clandestine wireless in a basement somewhere in occupied Europe tuned in to the BBC.
Stern's sensibility is vulgar in the literal sense. It expresses many of the grossly unfashionable convictions of the working class, and some of the forbidden thoughts of the bourgeoisie: the appalling things that might cross your mind when you are flipping through the New York Post. Things along the lines of "Bernie Goetz should be given a medal," "O.J. should be clubbed to death with his Bruno Magli shoes," or "I wonder what it's like to have sex with Pamela Anderson Lee." When you hear Howard say this sort of thing, you realize that you are not alone.
The radio program is very much a team effort. The Stern gang functions like a traditional but eccentric and multiracial American family. Howard Stern would not be Howard Stern without Miss Quivers, a clever, beautiful, tolerant black woman with an extraordinarily musical laugh.
Stern is not a racist. His listeners can tell he's not, even though he traffics in every possible ethnic stereotype. They know that he's being tongue in cheek and they also know that he is acknowledging that all stereotypes have some basis in truth. This acknowledgement has a strangely disarming effect. You'll often hear Stern ask an Italian, Jewish, black, Chinese, Irish, Puerto Rican, WASP, or homosexual guest some wince-making question about the group's alleged proclivities. But instead of getting angry, this person will laugh or fire a joke back, because he or she is wrapped in Stern's odd aura of innocence. The relief that follows is like the calm after a summer storm.
Politically, Stern is something like a Reagan Democrat or a Clinton Republican with a healthy dose of Perotista cynicism about politicians. He is liberal on social and sexual issues and extremely conservative on crime and fiscal issues. He supported Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey, and his own, sadly abortive, run for governor of New York was largely based on the restoration of the death penalty. And he despises affirmative action. Furthermore, as his new movie makes clear, he is a very serious family man. He is devoted to his children, who are not allowed to listen to the radio and whom he claims to have told that he is a Harvard professor. His fidelity to his wife -- in the face of ever-increasing temptation -- is a central part of his schtick.
But the key to understanding the Stern phenomenon lies in his look. When I first heard him on the air, his deep, disk-jockey voice made me picture a square-jawed, clean-cut type, possibly rather short and stocky. In fact, as anyone who has turned on a television in the past three weeks must know, Stern is a skinny giant with a huge head of hair uncut in a style that was last fashionable in 1972. He wears black jeans, sunglasses, and a leather motorcycle jacket, like the once-popular rock singer Joey Ramone. It's a strange uniform because it is both deeply unfashionable and resolutely rebellious. It is what rock musicians used to wear. Stern doesn't play rock records on his show. But he expresses a rock 'n' roll sensibility, one leavened with a tendency to self-depreciation, particularly when it comes to his own lack of sexual prowess. Today, for all its adolescence, such a sensibility can seem quaintly old-fashioned, even conservative. Like the rock lyrics he grew up on, Stern is simultaneously lecherous and an advocate of true love and fidelity. He is also moralistic, petulant, prone to violent fantasy, sentimental, and firmly patriotic.
I would be embarrassed to have my grandmother accidentally tune in to Mr. Stern's show. He could not but offend people who grew up in an era when gentlemen in suits doffed their hats to ladies. But his coarseness hides a decency and common sense that still strike a chord with millions of Americans.