It’s Jest Radio : Behavior: It’s not just the prizes that lure listeners into baring and daring all for promotions. Some seek fleeting fame; others just want to have fun.

A North Hollywood man, buried chest-deep in a barrel of ice, lets KLOS-FM’s Mark and Brian shave his head and replace his hair with Silly String. He pockets a pair of Super Bowl tickets for his trouble.

In Houston, a radio audience eavesdrops as one woman confesses to another that she is sexually attracted to her.

In San Diego, two disc jockeys dial a restaurant pay phone and find a man willing to smash his car windshield for $50.

Tune in to radio stations across the country and there seems to be no end of listeners ready to lose their inhibitions, their pride, their minds and even their hair when they get on the air.

What possesses them?

The explanations--from the mental health pros, deejays and the listeners themselves--run an odd gamut, everything from narcissistic parents to the Challenger space shuttle explosion. The cash and other giveaways barely get mentioned.

“The prize has nothing to do with it,” says Lewis Carter, a La Jolla chef who mooned his boss for the chance to win a fax machine.

Doug Harris, director of promotions and marketing at Houston’s KLOL, says radio daredevils fall into two categories: Those who go public and make a spectacle of themselves, and those who hide behind radio’s relative anonymity, usually while revealing personal information.

The public-spectacle group is perhaps the hardest to fathom.

No stunt is so outrageous or so humiliating that somebody, somewhere won’t do it. KLOL’s “biggest butt” contest, for example, drew entrants of such girth that the official tape measure wouldn’t fit around them. Says Harris: “These are people who willingly allow their physical abnormalities to become the object of ridicule.”

That’s not surprising, says Carole Lieberman, a UCLA assistant professor of psychiatry who hosts a radio program. Americans have grown so obsessed with fame--envying it in others and wanting it for themselves--that many will travel untold lengths to achieve it, she says.

Such craving for the limelight often traces back to childhood, Lieberman says: “When a child is growing up, he needs to be seen and paid attention to by his parents in order to feel good about himself.

“However, parents have become increasingly narcissistic (and so) people are bringing this tremendous need to be seen, appreciated and understood (into adulthood),” says Lieberman, who did not comment on any specific radio cases.

And so radio daredevils call up and agree to strip in front of bug-eyed co-workers or swallow a dead snake.

“Even a moment of fame is inebriating,” she says, but sadly for some, that one moment “will be the big thing they did in their lives--they’ll talk about it forever.”

Lou Franzini, a San Diego State University psychology professor, has another theory: “It’s probably fun. . . . We shouldn’t discount that.”

Every now and then, people just like to cut loose, say deejays Jeff Elliott and Jerry St. James, who place calls to various pay phones from San Diego’s KFMB-FM and dare anyone who answers into such stunts as setting their pants afire or shaving their eyebrows.

Charles E. Krantz II, the man who replaced his hair with Silly String, admits to wanting a little fame but says, “Mostly, it was just fun. You only live once.”

And Lewis Carter, 28, the pants-dropping chef, says he simply likes to clown around: “It’s a way to get people going, to put them in a good mood.” He shrugs off theories about self-centered parents and addiction to fame.

Money also seems to separate the daredevils who do from those who don’t.

“A stockbroker isn’t going to do this stuff, as a rule,” says KLOL’s Harris. But neither will anyone else if the price isn’t right. Although $100 will buy a minor stunt--as in KLOL’s shoot-a-fire extinguisher-down-your-pants promotion--Harris says the ante rises to $500 or $1,000 for something like the biggest-butt contest or the 98-pound weakling “Mr. Punyverse” pageant. To push listeners completely over the edge, he advises nothing short of $10,000.

And then there’s the other side of radio antics where people tell all, but don’t always seem to be doing it for prizes or fame.

The Los Angeles headquarters for this group has to be the Mark and Brian program on KLOS. Callers here have gone on the air to confront a two-timing lover, propose marriage and tell off a boss.

(Hosts Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokeswoman that they “don’t like to be in comparison stories” with other stations.)

The show’s producer, Nicole Sandler, says some of the callers are looking for moral support to deal with sticky romance or work situations.

“Mark and Brian are kind of like everyone’s friend,” she says, and callers know the pair will add a little levity to the inevitable on-air showdown with employer, friend or mate.

Some other callers, however, venture into a different kind of personal revelation, what Harris calls “reverse voyeurism”--when a listener exposes his or her sex life and the audience becomes the Peeping Tom.

At Houston’s KLOL, the disclosures range from sexual fantasies to call-in demonstrations of the loudest vibrator.

“It’s all for shock value,” Harris theorizes.

He adds: “In a world of monogamous sex and minimal drug use, where you’re afraid of the caffeine in your coffee and you pass on dessert, we may be filling an important social need by giving people an outlet for this sort of thing.”

But Jim Ladd says FM radio “should be ashamed of itself.”

Ladd, a fixture on Los Angeles radio dials since the late 1960s, says the spread of “stupid contests (and) people who drop their pants on the air to get ratings . . . is an insult to the audience.”

FM stations have sold out their counterculture heritage, says the deejay, who now spins discs at “classic-rock” KLSX. Of course, he and other jocks of his era indulged in their own form of sexual innuendo: KMET’s All-Girl Harmonica Band shtick, for instance--in which Ladd read letters from women describing their “favorite place to play their boyfriend’s harmonica”--was a not-so-thinly disguised reference to oral sex.

“I’m not even going to say it was tasteful,” he concedes now. “But it was creative.”

And that creativity is what’s lacking today, he says. The difference between the old FM and the new is like “the difference between Lenny Bruce and Andrew Dice Clay.”

Harris views Ladd as a rock ‘n’ roll dinosaur. Radio had to change to survive, he says. Not only are today’s audiences more jaded--”they watched the Challenger blow up in their living rooms”--but they also have more choices.

“In 1965, eight-track was the only alternative to radio. Now, compact-disc players can make it sound like the Philharmonic orchestra is in your back seat and Led Zeppelin is under your hood. . . . The music can only take us so far in 1991. We’re now in the entertainment business.”

But some modifications might be in the offing. Mark and Brian, for instance, are shifting away from romantic awakenings and people running naked through stores to win concert tickets, their producer says: “Those are getting old.”

Sandler mentions recent bits with callers imitating Bullwinkle or playing musical instruments as evidence that “it doesn’t have to be risque to work.”

Harris also notices a trend away from sexually oriented humor, but says all other signs point toward increased outrageousness to capture audience attention.

Not surprisingly, then, contestant Krantz is already concocting his next Super Bowl bid. Last year, he reclined on a giant French loaf, slathered his body with mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup, wrapped himself in cellophane and presented the result as The Human Submarine Sandwich.

He lost.

This time, he’s thinking about dipping himself in plaster, wiring a light bulb to his head and donning a lampshade to become The Human Lamp.