WEEKEND REVIEWS : TV : Stern Sets Back New Year

“How does it feel?” asked Howard Stern, making a grand entrance on his New Year’s Eve pay-per-view special astride a rising toilet. “Forty bucks to watch me take a dump!”

Pretty crappy is how it felt, Howard, if you have to know.

But, amid all the false hope usually generated this time annually, Stern’s astronomically profitable live broadcast from Newark, N.J., did at least provide hapless payees a cold slap of reality to start ’94. What better way, really, to ring in the New Year than with a show that makes the case that human history has gone on perhaps just a year or two too long?

Probably never before have so many hundreds of thousands awakened Jan. 1 bereft of hangovers but still bleating I feel dirty over and over like a boozy mantra.

“The Miss Howard Stern New Year’s Eve Pageant” came in the quasi-parodic guise of a nearly pornographic beauty contest, winding up sort of a cross between Michael Ritchie’s “Smile” and Penthouse magazine’s humor section. Or was it a cross between “Stupid Human Tricks” and the Chicken Ranch?

Forty shameless young women competed for a $50,000 prize by baring breasts, indulging in not-so-hetero high jinks under Stern’s constant cajoling and demonstrating bizarre “talents.” Among the more printable nicknames: the Lesbian Ice Sculptress From Albany and Miss Chocolate Sundae. Among the more printable talents promised and delivered: “I love to cover myself with peanut butter and let strange men throw bread at me” and “I eat maggots.”

The other freak show was in the celebrity jury box.

Singer Janis Ian was the sole woman on the panel. (Guess why.) Rounding it out was a cast of blokes that looked glad to be anywhere, from singer Tiny Tim to black-baiting KKKer Daniel Carver to slightly clueless pugilist Joe Frazier. The honorary foreman was spousal-abuse poster boy John Wayne Bobbitt, who turned down Stern’s cash offers to show off his scars and muffed all his lines in a way that suggested he’d lost more blood than anyone thought.

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When the broadcast was satirizing the generic, outdated conventions of beauty pageants, it was sometimes hilarious.

When Stern was taking the poop out of major celebrities--starting with an absolutely witless Michael Jackson molestation skit, and improving with an amusing duet with Ian on “At Seventeen” viciously rewritten about Jerry Seinfeld and his teen-aged girlfriend, plus a Whoopi-’n’-Ted sketch with Sherman Hemsley--he was at least excusable. Even if Stern assailing other stars’ moral sense is like the pot calling the kettle kitchenware.

But when the focus was “up close and personal” on the pageant’s 40 contestants, the special veered between the occasionally funny “found” humor of real-life crazies and a pathos that rendered the whole enterprise finally about as much fun as “Schindler’s List.”

One woman whose nickname compared her breasts to fried eggs appeared so drunk she might have fallen over. Another who claimed she’s regularly seduced by space aliens seemed to be suffering strange facial seizures, as if possessed. And then there was the tape of the topless wanna-be being interviewed on Stern’s radio show, cajoled into discussing her mother’s shooting death, only to faint on the studio floor--where, Stern compassionately added, she was lucky not to have been molested.

Sad sights to take into the new year, by almost any standard.

Unsaddened, Stern himself was amazed at the compliance when he suggested contestants grope each other for extra points: “Evidently this is an orgy,” he marveled.

Evidently that makes Stern a word that starts with a P, and it’s not pay-per-view proprietor.