4/2/2023 0 Comments Best crank yankers callThe Jerky Boys' Venn diagram of comedy, where the outrageously foulmouthed overlaps with the flawed and fundamentally human, is the laughter-inducing sweet spot that Arrested Development and Judd Apatow films continued to aim for. in a recognizable and sympathetic motivation: These characters just wanted someone to talk to. There are easy, broadly stereotypical jokes to make using these guys, but Brennan and Ahmed rooted Sol and Co. Brennan woke her son with wails of, "Oh, my back, oh, Jesus Christ." Jack Tors is based on a down-on-his-luck gay man Brennan's father took into their home when Brennan was about five years old. He tells me that while most boys received a cheery, "Good morning, honey, what would you like for breakfast?" Mrs. That belt would come off and he'd whip my fucking ass – you're talking old-school." Sol, with his knack for complaining about the most insignificant of problems, is a lot like Brennan's mother. "My father is Frank Rizzo," offers Brennan. There are some non-ass-specific characters too, but Brennan stuck mainly to the aforementioned three, all of whom were based on people he knew. It's impossible to know how many bootlegged tapes of Jerkys calls were made and shared, but safe to assume that the figure is in the millions. Cumulatively, the Jerky Boys' officially released albums have sold more than 3 million copies. The 1995 follow-up, The Jerky Boys 2, went platinum and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Comedy Album. Their 1993 self-titled debut reached Number One on Billboard's Heatseekers list, besting Radiohead's Pablo Honey, which took its title from a Jerky Boys sketch. They may not have come up with the idea for the thing that brought them success, but they pretty much perfected it.īefore phones became the text-based emoji-makers they are today, the Jerky Boys released five albums of recorded prank phone calls. "a coupla' lowlifes from Queens," to quote 1995's The Jerky Boys: The Movie – are to prank calling what Steve Jobs and that other guy are to personal computing. Or a time, Brennan and Ahmed were as big as comedy got. RELATED Seth Macfarlane on Hosting the Oscars, Being Hated by South Park "I think we got something there," he says, reverting to his natural Queens drawl. "I fell through the floorboards!"Īfter the confused hostess eventually hangs up, Brennan looks relieved. "I was there during that remodeling," kvetches Sol. "With all the remodeling this summer," she says, "it maybe got put into storage and not back up." He sure doesn't seem rusty. In less than two minutes, Brennan/Rosenberg has the hostess grasping for reasons why the restaurant had misplaced a photo of him that doesn't exist. "Hi, how're you," whines Brennan, affecting a reedy, nebbishy voice. Brennan takes another quick gulp of water. It's this man who wants back in the game. It's this man who's poised before a iPhone. (The lights are all on, for one.) He's aged from a mullet-and-goatee-sporting outer-borough scamp into a clean-shaven, leather-jacket-wearing, 51-year-old dad who drives an SUV and owns a little dog named Taco. On this turn-back-the-clock day in late December, when Brennan is set to resume his pranking ways, things are very different. JACK TORS Is a happy ending too much to ask? answers. Starting in the late Seventies, he would lie on the floor of his middle-class parents' living room in Queens, New York, holding the phone receiver close to a clunky tape recorder with the lights turned down low, and start dialing. But for a big chunk of his adult life, prank calling was Brennan's reason for being. The influence of the Jerky Boys' improvisational hilarity and genius conversational jujitsu kept going, penetrating deep into the culture, and shaping the approach of the likes of Bridesmaids director Paul Feig, rising-star comedienne Amy Schumer and Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, all of whom were inspired by Brennan and Ahmed's decidedly nonironic style. But if he wasn't feeling it, plenty of other people were. "I wasn't feeling it" is Brennan's enigmatic way, nowadays, of explaining why he ceased prank calling. Collected on a series of albums, those calls resulted in platinum sales, a Hollywood movie based on the duo's life, and a legion of celebrity fans. The goal? To drive the dupes on the other end of the line into a rage, or confuse them or just keep them engaged in an absurd conversation – whatever it took to make people laugh. Back in the Nineties, under the moniker of the Jerky Boys, Brennan, along with his partner and co-conspirator Kamal Ahmed, regularly used to ring people up and assume the role of overbearing whiner, aggressive meathead, astoundingly flamboyant out-of-work actor or any number of other outlandish characters.
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