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Paul Cullum in the LA Weekly is the latest writer to seek to explain Phil Hendrie, the KFI talk host who relies more than most AM talkers on his callers being clueless. Hendrie, if you don't know, is the ultimate spoofer of talk radio's moronic side. In classic AM fashion, he puts on provocative guests who get listeners so irate they phone in cussing and sputtering. The entertainment for the rest of us is that the callers don't realize the outrageous, ire-inducing guests don't exist. They are all Hendrie doing voices, and he knows how to push callers to the edge while the audience that is in on the joke laughs at them. Cullum's story ultimately asks why a guy who has been fooling people for so long can't go bigger than radio.
Much like Robin Williams when he first emerged from the improv comedy clubs of early-’70s San Francisco, Hendrie — radio dog, stellar mimic, cult avatar, meta-theorist and polyphrenic zookeeper — has become something of a design problem: Everyone agrees he’s the best in the world at what he does, without having the slightest idea how to translate that into film or TV...Hendrie is aided in his deception by an almost preternatural ability to alter his phrasing, stagger his breathing, calibrate his ear for idiom, and switch back and forth between voices, using nothing more than a hand-held microphone, at a speed at which the brain can scarcely fathom it, even when you’re staring right at him.
"Try this when you drive home tonight," says Jonah "Bing" Weiland, Hendrie’s one-time producer and call screener. "Talk to yourself — hold a conversation with two sides. It’s impossible. You can do the voice, yes, and you can answer yourself, but it won’t make sense. That’s the amazing thing that he can do."
Also: All week I've stayed far away from doing any play-by-play on the gushing Reagan tributes, angry critiques and personal remembrances in the local media and blogosphere. I knew there was no way I'd be able to keep up with it all, and I see no reason to start now. So suffice to say, the weeklies coming out today are deeply into the subject.