What A Character

Occasionally, I would come up with a concept that required a certain sort of person to make the concept work. I could never find these people in the real world, besides if I did I would have to pay them, so I did the next best thing. I made them up. This is why there are casting directors in the movies. An idea can only be made to be funny if the characters are funny, and fit the part.
I think I'll introduce you to two long lasting nimrods that were on the air with me at WSPR, WLDM, and finally at WNNZ.
Felix Pernaverny and Clarence Fempter.
I had an idea in the mid 80's about traffic reports in the morning for my radio show, but like every other station I worked at, there was no money in the budget. Helicopter reports were becomming commonplace in larger markets. They always seemed stupid to me, for whenever you heard of some problem on the roads, you were already in the middle of the traffic snafu, or had just passed the exit that would have allowed you to get around it, or if you didn't have a job and nowhere to go to, you'd head to the spot of the incident to rubberneck, thereby furthur complicating the lives of cops and hundreds of angry people who are now late for work.. Now I was about to institute fake traffic reports around Springfield with two way out characters, but I couldn't make them sound too real. Lord knows there are people out there that believe everything they hear on the airwaves. So I created Felix Pernaverny's Discount Helo Service. Felix was the worst of the worst when it comes to deadbeats. He drank, gambled to excess, and was a schyster who got away with everything illegal and immoral, coming out of it smelling like a rose. His co pilot Clarence was not the brightest bulb in the silverware drawer either. Felix was married once to Clarences sister Shirley. When they were kids, Shirley used a staple gun to staple Clarences hat to his head so he wouldn't loose it. Clarence had to quit school in the third grade because he was getting too big to fit behind the desks.
Every day, I would send a signal to the helo to start the report, and every day there was a problem, so a traffic report was never given, just another story about some inane issue in the lives of Clarence and Felix.
I penned about 160 episodes of this bit, and did all of the sound. Every episode ran four to five minutes. When I wrote these episodes, the words just flowed, the ideas were endless, and I would laugh out loud, envisioning the episode in my mind. It was not unusual for me to get off the air, and spend the afternoon writing. I would go back to the station at night and bring the scripts to life. There was a constant loop of the sound of a helicopter in the background. I would grab a studio tape for each character and number the script so I knew what tape a character went on. I wrote this stuff so I already knew the inflections that were needed. When all of the lines were recorded, I started up a reel to reel tape recorder, started the loop, and then just pressed the corresponding tape to the script, and an episode came to life. The next morning the episode would air twice, and that was it. It took about 5 hours to do each one, and some were pretty complicated as there were episodes that had different characters, (ergo, different voices ) flying the WW2 army surplus helicopter. The whole family of the Pernavernys were nuts. Verna and Bernie Pernaverny his parents. Hortense and Laverne, the boys girlfriends, Clarence's brother Nestor Fempter, and a few others. Felix's family all operated "discount" services of some kind .Whenever there was call for a service of some sort, Felix always had a cousin who owned...for example..Ernie Pernaverny's Discount Law Firm, or Stetson Pernaverny's Discount Lawn Care.
All in all there were 22 different characters in this bit, and it got funnier and funnier.I would always use towns and streets in the area, and people would call me on occasion telling me that they looked for this helicopter and could never see it up there. I was amazed at those calls.
When I first dreamed this thing up, I had to be sure to get the proper names for the characters. I didn't want to use any name that could be associated with anybody, or religion, or ethnic background. One of my radio idols when I was a kid was a guy on WHYN. His name was Tom, but on the air he was Bud Stone, and he was funny. He started a radio club and if you wanted to join the club, you wrote a letter to him and you became an official member of " The Purn Club ". Myself and hundreds of others became Purns. In homage to one of my heros, the name Pernaverny was created some 20 years later. Clarence Fempter I just dreamed up. It sounded funny and as Clarence was a character who should'nt have been allowed on the street alone, it fit like a glove.
I was lured away from WSPR by the promise of bigger and better things. The station I went to was run by a husband and wife and she used to follow the helo reports like a soap opera. One of the conditions of me going to work for them was that I bring the concept to their station. About two months into my tenure there, he came into the studio one morning and said the helocopter sound effects in the reports was annoying, and I should stop using it. Helocopter reports with no helo sound. Well, now...this is brilliant. It then went from the Whispercopter report to the Whisperbugger reports, as I then had them in an old VW every morning. This annoyed him too. Eventually the daily reports went from daily to a Friday report from the tower site, and finally he told me to stop it all together.
When I was at WREB, I introduced to the public Mz. Clara Washington, the last living daughter of George. She was nuts and would pop in for Christmas time, Thanksgiving, or no reason at all. She ran a potato farm in Connecticut someplace. She was 107 at the time, and completely off the wall. I would write these scripts with my friend Chip in mind as he would always interview her,(me) on the air. I would give him the script, he'd scan it over. We went into production and taped it. First take, every time. The guy is a genius.
Chester J. Misque was an editorialist who came on weekly. In the 1980's, he did an editorial on aids. He thought there was a problem with eating too much of the diet chocolate that was around then.That character was also a moron.
One day at lunch I came up with an idea for a Dragnet episode. Chip and me again. He was Joe Friday, I was Bill Gannon. It was '"The Night Before Christmas". A report came in about a night time B&E, and they went to the house with the standard "just the facts ma'am.." What made it funny is that it was The Night Before Christmas verbatim. The whole poem, interjected with questions by Joe and Bill.. Of course, the boys got their man at the end. One Kris Kringle.
I remember hearing The 12 Days of Christmas on the radio one day. It occured to me that the only thing of value in that song are the 5 golden rings. Literally, 45 minutes later, I had written a script with 2 characters about this song. Till I left the airwaves, it was the most requested thing I had ever created for radio, and to this day people ask me for a copy of it. One day a woman called me telling me she was listening to it on her way to work, peed in her pants from laughing, and had to go back home..
Then there was Cozy Man. Fifteen characters. A weekly radio soap opera about a guy whose whole purpose in life was to go around and make everybody's life comfortable and cozy.This started out when a place called The Cozy Inn on Rt. 20 in Westfield started advertising with WREB. The salesman wanted me to come up with something funny to promote the little bistro. So Cozy Man was born, along with his trusty sidekick, Samuel. Horace and Shirley Glump were their arch enemies, and they once crash landed a plane in the Frinkleville jungle. Go figure. It worked..People loved this thing. Problem was that John and Joanie, the owners od the Cozy Inn, drank up the profits, and one night the farm they had that was in foreclosure mysteriously burned down, and they went back to New York.
It was always so much fun creating characters, and it transported people back to a time when radio was king and you got to make up who the people were and what they looked like. It was imagination, it was silly, it was funny, and I got to do this at a time just before the magic of radio faded away into a platform for selling prescription medications to the masses. Larry Glick replaced by Michael Savage. Cousin Brucie, replaced by Dean Edell . There's no fun out there for the most part, because there are no characters out there. When's the last time you heard the series "Chickenman" on the radio. In the sixties, this was one FUNNY show. I have the entire series on tape, and every few years or so I dig it out and it's still funny today. Find out how funny it is. http://www.danoday.com/chickenman . How many people record Limbaugh or Drudge off the air? In years to come, will these recordings be something to listen to and recall the good old days? Will we ever really look forward to hearing a great show everyday? Perhaps if you have some old reel to reel tapes your family might have floating around the cellar somewhere, and if you're lucky enought to have a player, you might find some recording of someone from years gone by that your father or grandfather thought was good enough to tape. Who knows? You might find an episode or two of Cozy Man or Clara Washington on them.. You'll never be able to hear those characters on live radio ever again, but when they were there, they made you laugh and feel better about things. That's one of our problems today. We listen to get angry, not to have fun.Thank you corporate America..