Remember when you were a young buck, and you and your friends would gather around, get all excited and make prank phone calls? Man those were good times, but inevitably you and your buddies would lose it and end up saying “fuck you gaylord” or something childish and stupid into the phone before hanging up. Worked every time. Where did this fad come from? Why were millions of adolescent males dialing up random numbers and harassing innocent people for years? All this fun and shenanigans is owed to the genius of a bored, overweight and otherwise useless duo from Queens; Johnny Brennan and Kamal, better known as the Jerky Boys. Everyone remembers the Jerky Boys, those two degenerates who taped their prank phone calls, put them on CD’s and sold them to millions of kids for 20 bucks a pop. What a fucking idea, those two probably made a killing, kids ate that shit up. Listening to the Jerky Boys was just the thing to do when you were in middle school, like listening to Pearl Jam, hating your parents or excessively masturbating. The Jerky Boys released their first album in 1993, conveniently titled, The Jerky Boys, which went certified double-platinum. The 1994 follow-up, Jerky Boys 2 also went certified platinum. Just for those who don’t know, platinum means 1 million units sold. Just to put that into perspective, Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” is triple platinum. I personally don’t like Lil’ Wayne, but everyone else in the world does, and it’s only sold about 800k more than The Jerky Boys. One of the biggest rappers in the world, just beating out two fat dudes from Queens. All told, the Jerky Boys released 6 albums between 1993 and 2001 and even a movie in 1995, which I believe 14 people saw. But they’re influence in the mid-to-late nineties will forever be felt. Everyone was going around doing the voices, some of which still get my chuckling today. I still call people bologna tits. Notable characters were;
-Sol Rosenberg, the nervous Jew who was always suffering from some ridiculous ailment
-Frank Rizzo, the obnoxious blue-collar Italian dude with a short fuse.
-Tarbash the Egyptian Magician, the Middle-Eastern who was always in physical pain. Not to be confused with Kerpal of “You kicked my dog” fame.
There were plenty of funny characters, but those are the guys I still quote occasionally, literally 10 years after I last listened to them. I loved the Jerky Boys, I listened to that crap and laughed my ass off, even my mom thought they were hilarious. Every so often now when I throw out a Jerky Boys quote, I’m met with two reactions; either someone knows exactly what I’m talking about, or they think I’m a crazy crack-head who has a pet snake and a “People to Kill” list. But a wise man once said for every action there is a reaction, and I can imagine a lot of people didn’t appreciate the Jerky Boys brand of humor. Most notably the small store owners, private businesses and doctor’s offices that got millions of prank phone calls from dumb 12 year olds. Also, parents probably didn’t appreciate their young son listening to edgy material only to jack up the phone bill by calling “Phil’s Carpet Cleaning” 45 times asking if they’ll come and lick your mom’s rug. One of those generational things; our parents had Richard Pryor, we had the Jerky Boys.
So my real question is what the hell happened to these guys? Well, like most successful artists, they ran into some creative differences, jealousy issues and sliding sales and ultimately split up in 2000, with Kamal leaving the group. TV shows like Crank Yankers tried to capitalize on the prank call craze, but for the most part they missed the boat. Yeah some of them were funny (basically Tracy Morgan’s and Dane Cook’s before he got gay) but the whole puppet thing really never appealed to me. The Jerky Boys were the original and as we all know nothing ever beats the first. The good news though, is apparently they are releasing album sometime in 2010. The window may have closed for the Jerky Boys though, as texting, emailing, tweeting, facebooking, IM’ing, sign language, interpretive dancing, two-waying and hieroglyphics have all replaced actually phone calls as a means of communication. Maybe these two fat slobs are the ones to change all that. At the very least they’ll have me and Tom giggling like 6 year olds. So open that page in the book of your life back up, and remember these guys for the icons that they are.
That dog’ll hunt
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