Broadcasting: Killer Joe

Insult, like any other minor art, attracts its not-so-artful practitioners. Currently the bluntest instrument of them all is a Los Angeles broadcaster named Joe Pyne, who has become simultaneously the industry’s hottest property and, as New York Times Critic Jack Gould recently said, its “ranking nuisance.” On his interview shows, Pyne often addresses callers and guests as “stupid,” “jerk” or “meathead.” An epileptic was once asked: “Just why do you think people should feel sorry for you?” Pyne’s standard lines run from “Go gargle with razor blades” to “Take your teeth out, put ’em in backwards and bite your throat.” Says Pyne of himself: “I’m not a nice guy, and I don’t want to be.”

Why should he—when being so nasty makes him so popular? His morning hot-line radio show ranks No. 1 in its time slot among the 90-odd stations in the Los Angeles area. His local weekly TV interview show is doing just as well. Another TV program, taped for syndication, is carried weekly in three cities across the country and 21 more will be added in September. His syndicated radio interviews play daily in 254 cities, with an average ten new stations signing up each week. In addition, Pyne is host of NBC’s daily Showdown, a typically mindless daytime quiz game. Blond, seldom-smiling Joseph Pyne, 41, is on the air altogether 27 hours a week, earns about $200,000 a year.

Masochism Syndrome. Pennsylvania-born Pyne got his first job at the age of eleven working on an ice truck in Atlantic City, later put in time on seven radio stations in four states and Canada. A World War II marine with three battle stars and a wooden leg, Pyne fancies himself a foreign-affairs expert. His Asia policy, for instance, is to bomb Red China. When California Democratic Congressman Jeffrey Cohelan expressed a less hawkish view, Pyne, who had phoned him for an opinion in the first place, sneered: “What qualifies you to comment on military strategy?”

A better question is why anyone bothers to confront Pyne. “It’s a masochism syndrome,” opines Pyne. “They look to me for approbation, as a father image, but sometimes they feel the need to be punished—and they know that I’ll punish them.” Many of those who do volunteer are extremist polemicists or plain hucksters who will suffer any indignity for a soapbox. Characteristic guests on his syndicated TV show: Black Muslims, prophets of eccentric sects, American Nazis, champions of free love or free LSD, homosexuals, and Helen Gurley Brown.

Punching the Producer. Members of the studio audience, who themselves tend to resemble a road company of Marat/Sade, are invited into the “Beef Box” to vent further ill logic, ill manners, neologisms and non sequiturs. Guests are frequently told to “get lost” or they steam off the set voluntarily; one threw a phone at Joe (it missed), punched the producer in the mouth. During last year’s Watts riot, Pyne displayed a gun on screen in front of a Negro guest and was himself bounced for a week. Pyne does not deny charges that he prefers heat over light. “The subject must be visceral,” he figures. “We want emotion, not mental involvement.”