His Special Ed still resonates with fans who go to Florentine’s stand-up shows. "Eventually, if we got through that list, we’d just open the phone book and start making phone calls. To protect myself from the potential ravages of "Crank Yankers," I started talking very cautiously and briefly to any odd squirrel who called.įlorentine now tells me that was a good plan because, normally, he and other comedians would be given a list of 30 phone numbers to call. Florentine would stay at Bellagio, then record his calls at a nearby studio.Īs the rock critic back then, I sometimes fielded bizarro calls from weirdos. The show was produced by Adam Carolla and former Las Vegan Jimmy Kimmel, who set up a lot of calls from here. Years back, he played Special Ed ("I got mail, yaaay") and other characters while making prank calls for Comedy Central’s "Crank Yankers."Īt the time, I knew "Crank Yankers" was operating from Las Vegas. Though some digital compression is noticeable in parts, the show’s puppets look great-their colors are rich and contrast is top-notch-and sound almost as good (if the people getting cranked don’t sound as good as the crankers, that’s to be expected).Comedian Jim Florentine changed the way I talk on the phone to strangers. Curiously, the lame musical performances (from Tenacious D and Ween) that physically bring many of the puppets together less successfully evoke a sense of community in Yankerville than the regular scenic transitions and Laugh In-style non sequiturs, from the Sesame Street potshots to the “Confucius Says” jokes.
In the first season, the creators were clearly trying to figure out the best way to piece the show’s skits together. My favorite cranks from the show’s first season (in no particular order): the perpetually horny Cammie (Lisa Kushell) toys with a sad and lonely computer nerd after one of her drives goes bust Gladys (Wanda Sykes) accuses a mechanic of having “pinched a loaf” inside her car “Batman’s Nemesis” (Jordan Rubin) asks a clueless New York City operator for the address to Batman’s lair Special Ed (Jim Florentine, a master of comedic timing) calls a computer technician to report that he got mail on his computer a woman at a beauty parlor secretly tells Hadassah (Sarah Silverman) that she can cure her case of the crabs with plain yogurt, advice the cranker interprets as a “a battle of good and evil in my vagina” and Hadassah a phone call to a freaky Oprah fan to leak information about the abuses she and her co-workers incur at the hands of her celebrity boss.
If you can tell a lot about a person by the way they answer the phone, then I wonder what you can tell about a person by what sketches they prefer. Some of the cranks may be mean-spirited, but I can’t think of another comedy on television this concerned with testing people’s tolerance levels and compassion for others. It’s amazing what you can tell about a person by the way they answer and respond to a crank caller, observations the creators of the show brilliantly incorporate into the program’s aesthetic (one particularly hard-assed crankee has a picture of Ronald Reagan next to his phone).Įvery week, the creators miraculously tap into the social problems that separate the caller and the person being called, and every response is a reminder of the way we connect (or don’t) with one another. Like the town of Yankerville where the show’s puppets reside, the phone calls may be fake but the embarrassments they elicit are very real. Why puppets? Maybe because the producers of Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers, one of the funniest programs on network television, wanted to comment on the ease with which they can pull people’s strings.
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