All Mock, All the Time

The woman calling Phil Hendrie’s evening radio program on KFI-AM (640) is furious. Sputtering on the verge of apoplexy, she fumes about Hendrie’s guest for this hour, an elderly woman on the phone from Florida calling for a boycott of the Christian group known as the Promise Keepers.

It’s not just the guest’s argument--that by holding their all-male meetings in stadiums rather than churches, the organization is unchristian--that has the listener in her state, but the increasingly insulting put-downs and counterclaims the older woman has been using against those defending the Promise Keepers.

“You’ve got me so angry I’m shaking,” says the listener, trying to fend off the insults being hurled her way.

But as the exchange goes on, with Hendrie’s refereeing seeming only to escalate matters, the caller thinks she smells something fishy about the whole thing and suddenly takes a wholly different tone of anger.

“I can see this is so phony,” she says. “A Christian woman would never talk to another human like this.”

Still, the conversation goes on, increasingly heated, until the caller exasperatedly declares: “You can’t get my goat, because I know this is phony.”

Hendrie cuts the caller off. “We already have, ma’am,” he chimes, with a sense of smug satisfaction.

See, the caller was right. This bit of radio was fake, a total charade. The Christian crusader was actually Hendrie himself, doing a character voice through a phone receiver (complete with fuzzy long-distance effects), with light-speed shifts back and forth between that and his “real” character, the resonant-voiced host at the radio microphone.

Meanwhile, Jonah Weiland, the show’s young producer, plays his role in the farce, sitting in a neighboring studio separated from Hendrie’s by a glass partition, screening the incoming calls for both people who can’t get their thoughts out well enough--and those who might know too much about what’s really going on.

“No, it’s not the same woman who was on last week,” he tells one caller. “How do I know? I’m the producer of this show and I booked both guests. I have both their home phone numbers. This one is named Viola, last week’s was Margaret.”

But for the woman who sensed what was up during the Promise Keepers discussion, it was too late. She’d already become an unwitting player in Hendrie’s theater of the air: four hours (7 to 11) each weeknight of standing the whole concept of talk radio on its ear--and then stomping all over it in madcap glee. Every “guest” he interviews is phony: It’s always him doing both voices, trying to rile unknowing listeners so they’ll call and amuse everyone else with their anger, frustration or perplexity.

“People need to understand that when they’re on the air, they’re on a stage,” Hendrie, 45, says the next day while sitting in his “smoking lounge”--a couple of junked chairs in the garage of KFI’s Wilshire district offices--before his show. “They’re not the reason for this show. This is not about hearing their opinion. This is about entertaining an audience, and they become actors in that drama.”

But the truth is that Hendrie’s callers often don’t understand that they’re mere foils. In fact, the very nature of the show relies on them not realizing that the show is staged. They have to buy the “guests” as real people, no matter how absurd it gets. And sometimes it gets very absurd:

* One recent show featured two hours of an unfolding “news” story that had the Tooth Fairy shot and killed by a Hollywood man who mistook it for a home invader. Hendrie, doing all the voices, went back and forth between newsroom reports (from incompetent intern Bud Dickman), a news copter pilot and the Tooth Fairy’s attorney, prompting calls from listeners who, if not exactly accepting that the Tooth Fairy was real, still thought perhaps someone masquerading as the character had been shot.

* On another, Hendrie voiced a grandmother claiming to have just knocked out and robbed a gas station attendant in order to feed her starving grandchildren. Listeners called offering to help her if she’d give the money back, but her demands became increasingly ridiculous. One concerned woman even called The Times, quite distressed that one of the grandchildren was said to have fainted from hunger while the show was on.

* In the guise of the author of a book about how to get around L.A., Hendrie had callers engaging in heated trades of insults with the “guest,” who proved to be a font of gross misinformation, in one case abusively insisting that a caller was crazy to say that Claremont (the caller’s hometown) was anywhere near Pomona.

* On his very first night on KFI, just over a year ago, Hendrie pretended to have Program Director David G. Hall on the phone, defending Hendrie’s hiring to replace the fired Mr. KFI. Hendrie’s Hall character, sounding perhaps inebriated, outright insulted callers complaining about the switch and has remained an unpleasant presence in regular subsequent appearances.

About the only thing Hendrie has done on the air in his year at KFI that isn’t fiction is wed weekend show host Maria Sanchez. The two now live north of Los Angeles with her four children, painting a picture of a contented family man that some might find at odds next to the acerbic Hendrie they hear on the radio. Unless he’s fooled everyone with this one too.

Somewhere in performance art heaven, Andy Kaufman is having a good laugh about all this.

“Andy Kaufman was brilliant,” says Hendrie, a bald, animated man who makes as large a physical presence as his voice does an audio one. “He was a real influence on me, because he tried everything and was tremendously courageous. And he wouldn’t necessarily beat a punch line into the ground. He left it for the audience to get it. He didn’t explain it to them. He didn’t have to go on, for instance, and say, ‘It’s a goof.’ Either you got it or you didn’t.”

Hendrie does start out his show most nights by saying, “It’s a goof,” but that’s about as much of a tip-off as he generally gives. But even without any disclaimer, it would be hard to believe that any regular listener can’t hear what’s going on. Not realizing that all the character voices are actually Hendrie is one thing--even watching him do it, it’s hard to accept. But the bits almost always veer far enough into unreality and absurdity in their course that it’s not an unreasonable conclusion that the only people who would actually call in to participate either must have just stumbled upon the show or must be, well, gullible.

“It relies on people being stupid--it’s victimizing,” says the general manager of a competing station who has spent a lot of time working in talk radio. “Phil is very funny and very creative. My concern would be that it’s mean-spirited. Howard Stern is too, but he’s more self-effacing about it.”

Hendrie doesn’t dispute that criticism. It’s the basis of his act, he acknowledges.

“Yeah, you can get frustrated with the callers, this handful of self-righteous people, self-important people, who will call a show,” he says. “But what can you do with that? Do you get angry and scream at them? I worked with a guy in Miami, Neil Rodgers, who was very good at putting callers down. Or do you take their gullibility and their ego and play with it? I don’t want to get into [an arguing contest] with anybody that calls up, but I don’t mind seeing how far I can take their emotional drive into some bizarre places.”

And apparently, a lot of people are willing to go there. In the recent Arbitron quarterly radio survey, Hendrie had more than doubled his ratings share for the show’s target 25-to-54 age group in his first year (from 1.8 when he came on in fall 1996 to 3.8 for last summer), surging past talk rival KABC-AM (790) even while the latter had Dodgers games at the height of the baseball season. Most significant, Hendrie kept people listening longer--up from last fall’s average of less than two hours a week to a full four hours in the summer quarter, as compared to KABC’s 2:30 for the same demographic.

So why would a bright, talented guy want to spend his life entertaining people he believes are idiots?

“The audience is different from the callers,” he stresses. “My listeners understand that it’s essentially a comedy show. They understand that it’s funny. I endeavor to achieve a high level of humor. I’m not saying we hit it out of the park all the time, but on the nights that we do, it’s fun, and people are laughing. I don’t care if I’m making a point. I don’t have any concern about improving the world. I want to enjoy myself, and I want my listeners to have a good time.

“And my callers--frankly, I don’t have much interest in or concern about them, because they’re not representative of the audience. Never have been. And probably a lot more talk-show hosts ought to get that message. Callers are not representative of the audience. They are representative of a frustrated minority of people.

“If there’s an O.J. Simpson or a Gulf War or, recently, Princess Diana, then you are probably going to get more people who feel they need to unburden themselves. But the regular business of doing a talk show where there isn’t anything all that compelling in the news means that you’re going to be talking to a lot of the same, twisted people, and they’re very uninteresting unless you do something very creative. And that’s what I endeavor to do.”

Simply put: “I’m not a fan of talk radio,” he says. “I don’t like what it is. I think talk radio itself is essentially dishonest--to say that you’re getting people’s real opinions, when in fact what you’re getting are the same handful of products and talk-show groupies. We’ve got three main talk stations in this town, and it’s probably the same 1,000 people who do all the calling.”

It was while doing straightforward talk radio that Hendrie reached this conclusion and simultaneously discovered his talents for fiction.

“During the Gulf War, I was at KVEN in Ventura,” says Hendrie, who in the course of his 25 years as a radio professional has done just about everything, from news and talk to deejaying music, including a stint on L.A.’s KLSX-FM (97.1) when it was a classic-rock outlet. “One day I did an Iraqi voice, and someone called in wanting to speak with the Iraqi. So I went ahead and talked to this caller. Then someone else called, also wanting to talk with the Iraqi, and I came to find out that people don’t much care whether the person is real or not, they simply want to talk to somebody compelling about the issues of the day, quote unquote.”

And how do the real talk radio hosts at KFI feel about being mocked? John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, whose straightforward talk show precedes Hendrie, are thrilled.

“We hate talk radio,” Kobylt says. “We say so on the air. But I used to just think that people who called talk radio were really stupid.”

Chiampou injects: “Phil’s proven it.”

Concludes Kobylt: “We play off listeners sometimes. But he takes it to the extreme. We love what he’s doing.”

In radio lore, two cases of “pulling one over” on the public come quickly to mind: Orson Welles’ historic 1939 “War of the Worlds,” which had listeners really believing that Martians were landing, and, less noble, the 1990 stunt by KROQ-FM morning men Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter, in which accomplice deejay Doug Roberts pretended to be a caller confessing to having killed his girlfriend a few years before. The former allegedly led to some public panic, but the latter incident spurred a 10-month investigation by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department into the supposed unsolved murder before it was found to be a hoax and the deejays were fined and ordered to perform community service.

Hendrie’s show falls somewhere between the two. Importantly, it stops short--perhaps sometimes just short--of crossing the line set by the Federal Communications Commission regarding illegal broadcast hoaxes. The regulations were actually formalized in the wake of the Kevin & Bean incident, explains Chuck Kelley, chief of enforcement in the FCC mass media bureau, and are very clear.

The rules prohibit the broadcast of “false information concerning a crime or catastrophe” if the broadcaster knows it is false, if it is “foreseeable that broadcast of the information will cause substantial public harm”--the harm defined as damage to property or to the health and safety of the general public, or the “diversion of law enforcement” or other public officers from their duties--and if it does indeed cause substantial public harm. Any program accompanied by a disclaimer making it clear that it is fiction, the rule says, is not in violation.

The very number of calls Hendrie gets each night from listeners believing there is at least some truth to what they are hearing is evidence that it is not clear to everyone that he is creating fiction. But thus far, there has been no known violation of the hoax rules, Kelley says.

Many complaints, though, have gone to David G. Hall, the real KFI program director whom Hendrie has portrayed regularly as a first-class jerk. Hall is amused, if perhaps reluctantly, by the public image with which he’s been saddled.

“I don’t get as much hate mail as I did for a while, but my boss, the general manager of the station, gets calls demanding I be fired for drinking on the job or coming on to listeners and being an overall [expletive],” he says. “But let me point out that one of the reasons Phil does that to me is he needs his boss to be worse than yours to make his bits work. If that weren’t the reason, I wouldn’t be comfortable with it.”

Hall, unlike producer Weiland, is not an active participant in the venture, refusing to further the fictions when people do call to complain.

“I never lie to people and never continue the theater,” he says. “That’s Phil’s job, not mine. Any time I get a complaint, I tell them what’s going on. Eight out of 10 have a positive response.”

The question, though, is will letting people in on the shtick ultimately spoil it? Hall thinks it might be just the opposite. People who don’t know it’s comedy tend to find Hendrie’s show boorish and insulting. People who have a clue tend to appreciate it more and tend to stay tuned longer to find out where a particular bit is leading, he says.

“It’s a tough question,” he says. “Part of me would like Phil to say it’s comedy every five minutes. The people who are the biggest fans are those who get it, and I want people to get it as quickly as possible because I want them to be fans. But the nature of it is that it’s all theater, and if you let people know too much, it might take away from that.”

Hall is not afraid of running out of callers who will be suckered in, though.

“That’s the least of my worries,” he says. “Our signal is so big at night, and there are so many five- and 10-[minute] listeners in their cars, that there will always be people not realizing what it really is.”

Hendrie also believes that the power of radio itself will always guarantee him a steady stream of cannon fodder.

“Even when you suck someone in to believing the Tooth Fairy exists, it doesn’t surprise me,” he says, “because the medium has such credibility with people. If I come on and say, ‘Good evening, the Tooth Fairy is dead,’ and I’m doing it from a 50,000-watt [antenna], people almost despite themselves want to believe it, because it’s coming from the radio.”

Still, at times he’s almost mystified by how far people are willing to believe, and how involved they can become. After hanging up on the woman who realized the Promise Keepers bit was fake, Hendrie turns off his microphone and shakes his head.

“People always think it’s a big deal to point out that this is fake,” he says. “Like it’s some big revelation!”