A Stern Lecture: Don’t Forget to Be Funny

Call it getting a noseful.

Viewers of Saturday’s disrobing of “The Howard Stern Radio Show” got a pungent whiff of the smelly underpants of late-night television. Where was a gas mask when you needed one?

As advertised, this latest challenger to NBC’s aging “Saturday Night Live” is almost entirely a video compilation of Stern’s radio show, and thus is a slimmer twin of his series on cable’s E! Entertainment, which places cameras in his radio studio and edits the segments into weeknight half-hours.

In other words, “The Howard Stern Radio Show” is supposed to be the best of HS on radio. Sort of like presenting the best of elephant flatulence or the best of enemas: hard to love, harder to forget.

HS may see that as a compliment. And in fact, at their best, he and his lead toady, Robin Quivers, and their supporting cast (Fred Norris, Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling and Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate) are magnificent farce, constructing entire X-rated rambling dialogues around absurdity--trivia that no one should care about--the way those geniuses, Bob and Ray, would ruminate at length in a squeaky clean monotone, for example, on the making of a bologna sandwich.

In the case of HS, the digestive process can be seductively noxious. You wolf it down, and wonder why. Although this show is much less a hoot than his earlier syndicated series, which featured mostly original material, some of his most tempting banality did surface Saturday night.

I mean there is HS at one point with two good-looking young babes in their prime (his specialty), one removing her bra and the other stripping all the way (with a blurring of private parts) and gyrating and leaning back on him as he responds euphorically. Standing at a microphone with a guitar is a nerdy, lanky Stern look-alike (long hair and shades) in a plaid shirt, green pants and white socks. The look-alike sings a song he has written about a celebrity (“The world is a mess, and they worry about your dress . . . Monica Lewinsky”), which HS naturally ridicules: “I gotta be honest with you. You sound like a douche bag.”

It was deliciously dumb, HS being a master of the mindless.

The irony here was that before the two women stripped, one said she was bisexual, and HS demanded that they kiss (remember he’d publicly promised lesbians, so his credibility was at stake). But when they did, the smooch was blurred, as if two women kissing was just too hot to be seen on a show that had just about everything else. Give us a break.

Speaking even as an HS fan, however, most of “The Howard Stern Radio Show” was very painful. Dumb without the delicious. That included the bodybuilding she-man claiming to be female whom HS personally checked out by feeling her breasts (which were covered by little black squares), before ordering the specimen into a bathroom with Quivers so that her private parts could be studied by another female. The Quivers report: “There was a lot of hanging stuff . . .” Ugh.

Hardly smarter was the opening specially produced bit with HS doing a lewd voice-over (“I want to show you my penis”) to pictures of President Clinton addressing the nation on Monday night. If HS must be crude, let him at least be funny.

He was at his absolute worst, though, while mocking O.J. Simpson in Sambo speech--something he loves to do--regarding a golf course interview one of his sidemen had gotten with Simpson. More than just unfunny, the ugly stereotyping was disgusting and insulting to all blacks, regardless of one’s opinion about Simpson.

By the time “The Howard Stern Radio Show” rolled around to his first annual “Frankenstein Make-Over Contest”--with HS and his fellow male judges assessing the first dumpling of a contestant, who requested liposuction and nose and boob jobs--the shock had worn off and HS desensitization had set in like concrete. Even though the other aspirants were held off until the coming Friday--Stern’s version of a cliffhanger ending--it had gotten to be boring.

Just who will be watching this show, which is airing on a dozen CBS-owned stations and other stations in syndication, but not the entire network? Perhaps types who might also swoon over KCBS-TV Channel 2 news, whose logo ran during the premiere with plugs for one of Stern’s sponsors, LifeStyles’ “condoms shaped for 2.” Also watching, CBS hopes, are the same adult males it wants to view the games it airs under an expensive new contract with the National Football League.

And of course, lots and lots of douche bags.