Mega 92.3’s Lopez Speaks Audience’s Language

On the heels of Steve Harvey’s arrival in morning drive, another established comedian, George Lopez, completes his first week today as a morning personality on KCMG-FM (92.3), known as Mega 92.3.

Station management is hoping the addition of Lopez, a longtime fixture in local comedy clubs and on the road, will help solidify and build on the pop and R&B; station’s following in the English-speaking Latino community. Lopez, Carlos Mencia and Paul Rodriguez are among the nation’s top touring Latino stand-up comics.

“It’s pretty dramatic, if you step back and think about it,” said Mike Marino, Mega’s program director. “George will be the only Latino celebrity on radio in the No. 1 market in the country speaking English.”

For his part, Lopez has conceded in the past that the packaging of Latino comics to Latino-only audiences is a double-edged sword--the jokes may get big laughs at home, but what happens when you hit the road, where shared cultural experiences aren’t as prevalent?

Seen in that light, Lopez, born and raised in the San Fernando Valley (and whose comedy both pokes fun at and explores ethnic identity) says Mega’s core audience of Latinos should provide the perfect forum to connect with his hometown audience.

“Their audience is really geared toward a Mexican American, Chicano, Latino audience,” Lopez says of Mega. “I’ve [appeared] on enough of their shows to know that the people who come to see me are the people who listen to Mega.”

Of his teaming with John London, whom the station hired a little over a year ago to anchor the morning “house party” team, Lopez joked: “I told them that we want to end up being like two LAPD cops driving around, one brown and one white.”

In addition to Lopez, who was signed to a one-year contract, the “house party” morning crew also includes Irma Blanco, who reports on Hollywood news.

In the summer Arbitron rankings, the last quarterly rankings released in October, Mega finished 10th in the Los Angeles market, a trend upward for the station in a market whose top stations for the period were the Spanish-language KSCA-FM (101.9) and KLVE-FM (107.5).

Ratings are based on listeners 12 and older in the Southern California area--a pool Arbitron estimates at more than 10.3 million--and determined by overall size of a station’s audience and amount of time people spend listening.

Whether a personality like Lopez can help Mega compete with the top Spanish-language stations in the city remains to be seen. But the addition of Lopez to the morning drive team seems designed in part to counter the presence of Harvey, a popular urban comic, on the Beat, KKBT-FM (100.3), where he began anchoring morning drive in September.

Harvey, in fact, was part of the highly successful “Kings of Comedy” tour, which showcased African American comics for years and then became the subject of a Spike Lee movie earlier this year. The tour helped spawn a Latino spinoff, “Yo Quiero Comedy,” which featured Lopez, Rodriguez and Mencia. Lopez is also featured in “Bread and Roses,” a film about a janitorial strike in Los Angeles and which had its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The movie is scheduled to be released next year, Lopez says.

But Lopez doesn’t think Mega sought out his services simply because of his status as a recognized ethnic minority comedian. Nor does he see it as a move to counter Harvey’s presence up the dial. Rather, he says, what he and Harvey reflect are voices that are “a little edgy, a little homey. . . . It’s not about race, it’s about class, per se. We’re at the same level [as the audience]. Some of us have made it, but we haven’t forgotten where we come from.”

* “John London and the House Party,” featuring George Lopez, airs 5:30-9:30 a.m. Monday through Friday on KCMG-FM (92.3).