One of the joys of working at night is being able to tune in nightly to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and stay informed on all the latest Bigfoot and poltergeist happenings out there. But about a week ago, I turned my radio on a little early and discovered my latest guilty pleasure: The Phil Hendrie Show.

OK, OK. I'm sure there are some of my fellow Democrats out there who probably know about Phil Hendrie and his infamous pro-Bush rants. But let's just set that aside right now, as personally I've never heard any of that. From what I've heard recently, The Phil Hendrie Show is a work of genius.

For the uninitiated, I'll explain. The show is much like any other AM talk-radio show. It's offensive. The guests are idiots and there is a lot of arguing. But here's where the genius comes in: all of the "guests" are portrayed by Hendrie himself. He's fairly open about that fact on the show, but still, every night people tune into the show and are completely duped. They call as if the guests are real (callers are screened so only the duped callers get through) and scream and yell about how idiotic the "guest" is. The more they scream, the more offensive the guest becomes, until Hendrie intervenes, "hangs up" on the guest, and then apologizes to the audience. It's awesome.

Hendrie has about 40 characters that he keeps in rotation. Recently, I've heard Hendrie portray a man who loaned someone $1,000, only to have the guy join the military and get killed in Iraq--so he's suing the guy's family. The angry calls poured in, meanwhile in the background, you could hear the "guest" adjusting his hot tub. What's wrong...can't a man be interviewed in a hot tub? What the hell country is this?

This article explains the show much better than I can, and lists some of Hendrie's characters. But maybe this article from the LA Weekly says it most eloquently:

"Hendrie has said he is not worried that exposure might ruin the show by tipping off potential callers — he believes you cannot overestimate the stupidity of the AM-radio audience, and his work is enduring testament to that fact. But his point is not to expose simple stupidity. His “guests” are sophisticated parodies designed to incite the easy anger of the self-righteous, whom he expertly lures by creating characters who run roughshod over their pieties — the sanctity and safety of American children, the meaning of patriotism, kindness to animals. He likes to create characters who have thinly veiled ulterior motives, which he reveals little by little, as if in a well-constructed one-act play.

Listening to Phil Hendrie combines the pure, illegitimate pleasure of making prank phone calls with an intense, stoned reading of Marshall McLuhan. Hendrie’s show is a scathing and wholly original critique of what passes as dialogue and debate in vast portions of our culture. He uses the AM-radio call-in audience as “found objects” to reveal their own prejudices and susceptibility to manipulation, and he in a sense bestows on them an eloquence they themselves do not possess. Hendrie takes the average, depressing predictability of the average American psyche and somehow makes it into joyful comedy."
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