We don't like to speak ill of the dead on this blog but the dead person in this case is Don Imus, who seemed to love speaking ill of everyone, dead or alive. I was not a fan of him on the radio and even if I'd wanted to be, most of his career was spent in marketplaces that did not include Los Angeles.
I first became aware of him in the early seventies because he had comedy albums out and they had Jack Davis covers. To this day, I'd buy a box of tampons if it had a Jack Davis drawing on the box, and back then, I was buying every comedy album I came across. I especially bought them when I found a copy in the 3-for-a-dollar bin at the old Rhino Records shop in Westwood, as I did with the above record. I took it home, listened and decided I'd overpaid. Imus struck me as a much-less-clever version (possibly, imitation) of my local radio fave, "Sweet" Dick Whittington on KABC and later other L.A. channels.
What I heard of him on that record and elsewhere, did not strike me as witty or funny. It just seemed sour. A lot of it was phone pranks and I'm not sure there's a lower form of anything that pretends to be humor than phone pranks. I can't recall laughing at anything in the second half of my life-to-date that could be described as a "prank." Usually, it's just being a colossal dick to someone and then onlookers are supposed to find the discomfort of the victim funny. I almost never do.
Mr. Imus was off my radar for a long time but about twenty years ago, my mother (of all people) became a steady viewer of his morning radio show as televised on MSNBC. She didn't like him — which was fortunate because I would have thought she'd gone senile…but she liked his program. This requires some explanation.
After my father died, my mother began to live her life only for herself. She would eat when she felt like it, sleep when she felt like it…and that was about it because her eyes were too bad to read or knit or watch much of what was on TV. Except when she had to be up at certain hours for doctor appointments (she had plenty of those) and caregiver visits, she might just sleep all day, be up all night and eat breakfast at Midnight and/or Dinner at 6 AM. She was often up at 4 AM or 5 AM or whenever Imus was on MSNBC so she'd tune him for four reasons…
One was that it was live and it wasn't a news program. News was too depressing and in those wee small hours, she craved a little company. Secondly, his guest list included a lot of people she liked. Thirdly, it was a radio show. They pointed cameras at Imus and his guests and put the video on MSNBC but if you couldn't see the TV screen, you weren't really missing anything. And lastly, she was fascinated by the relentless negativity of Mr. Don Imus. She said, "I think I only watch to see if anyone can get a kind word out of that awful man." She said every now and then, someone could.
But for the most part, she said, "He thinks his job is to say something mean about everyone and everything." She didn't take it seriously because, well, if you come at the world like that, your opinion of any person, place or thing is pretty worthless. Of course you don't like it. You don't think you're allowed to like it.
When she said that, it rang a bell with me. I got to thinking about a number of stand-up comedians I've seen and even a few I've known. They think it's their job to say something mean about everyone and everything. If you say, "Pass the salt," they think they have to make a smartass remark about people who ask you to pass the salt. If you say you like banana bread or shoelaces, they have to say something pissy about banana bread or shoelaces. It's not a viewpoint on the world. It's a bit.
And there's often a market for that bit. Don Imus certainly had a long and lucrative career and I think a lot of people we see on TV are not expressing honest opinions. They're like Rip Taylor throwing confetti or Soupy Sales getting hit with pies. They're doing a bit that's made them a lot of money. They're giving their audience what it wants.
About the only nice thing I can say about Don Imus on the event of his passing is that he gave my mother a lot of pleasant hours. She really enjoyed not liking the man.