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seemed just like the old days. A caller was on the line, and she and her
husband had very generously agreed, during a comedy segment called
"Guess What's in My Pants," to have sex so that listeners of a
radio show and its hosts, Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia, could eavesdrop
on all the fun.
Before the sex got under way, though, Mr. Cumia asked, mock-seriously,
"You are nowhere near a church, right?"
"There isn't a picture of Jesus in the room you're in, is
there?" he added. "Or anything? I don't want anything religious
in there."
The two hosts - known as Opie and Anthony - once had a bad experience
mixing sex and religion. Their highly popular afternoon radio show on WNEW-FM
in New York was consumed by scandal in 2002 after a couple called in
during a sex-in-public contest to say they were having sex inside St.
Patrick's Cathedral. Even by the outrageous standards of their trade, the
two hosts say they sensed that they had crossed a line. "We knew
that, morally, it was wrong," said Mr. Hughes, known as Opie because
of his childhood resemblance to Ron Howard's character on the "Andy
Griffith Show." The amorous couple were arrested, and in the storm of
negative publicity that followed, Opie and Anthony were fired.
Often shock jocks who go too far just move on to a bigger radio station
with a bigger salary. But Opie and Anthony's case was different. They
bravely went where no celebrities of their stature had gone before: to
satellite radio, where their show was revived this month on XM Satellite
Radio. Transmitted digitally to special receivers in cars and homes,
satellite radio occupies an outer orbit of the broadcast universe, where
neither the Federal Communications Commission nor advertisers have any
power over what can be said or done. The two major services claim just
over three million subscribers between them. XM, the more popular, offers
more than 100 channels of news, music and talk for $9.99 a month ($1.99
more for Mr. Cumia and Mr. Hughes's show). Sirius charges $12.95 a month.
Opie and Anthony's move has proved to be a kind of tipping point for
the new technology. Just days before they signed up, Bob Edwards, the
dignified alumnus of NPR's "Morning Edition," announced that he
also would move. More astonishingly, Howard Stern - the most famous name
in American radio and a constant thorn in the side of the F.C.C. - just
this month accepted a $500 million, five-year deal to join Sirius (which
will provide his show for only the basic subscription fee).
With all this on-air talent congregating in this new and still largely
uncharted broadcast realm, it's getting a little less easy to say which is
the satellite and which is the mothership. But what happens to shock jocks
used to endless constraints when they're suddenly catapulted into the
ether?
In their new studio on 57th Street last week, despite Mr. Cumia's
joking, nobody seemed the least bit nervous about the Tennessee couple
having sex on the air. Why should they be? Some people compare the
emerging world of satellite talk radio with pay cable. As on HBO,
comedians can loosen up and use the kind of language they could never use
on the public airwaves. But a better way to describe it might be as a kind
of Wild West of the airwaves. Regarding decency standards, it's every man
for himself. And with Mr. Stern's arrival, the two major services know
they may be headed for a big gunfight, one in which the permissiveness of
pay cable might begin to look prim by comparison.
Mr. Cumia and Mr. Hughes say they hate to be called shock jocks, but
for better or worse they are poster boys for the genre. They were fired
from another radio station in 1998 after declaring that Thomas M. Menino,
the mayor of Boston, had been killed in a car accident. (He was very much
alive.) So in courting Mr. Cumia and Mr. Hughes, XM made it clear that
there would be almost nothing the company would prevent the pair from
doing short of outright criminal acts. "I think that the only
standards are the rules that humanity has made for humans," Mr. Cumia
said last week, smiling wickedly after the pair's ninth show.
Eric Logan, the executive vice president of programming for XM, held
the same title at WNEW's parent company, Infinity, when the old Opie and
Anthony show was canceled, and he said he was happy about their being back
on the air.
"I think what they're popular for is a unique kind of content that
we realize is not for everybody, but there is a market for it," he
said.
Their show one recent morning included many of what have become
drive-time comedy standbys: mocking mentally retarded and gay people,
debating women's anatomy and making racist remarks, ostensibly as a way to
make fun of racists or political correctness or both. But in addition to
these bits, most of which they could have done (very carefully, with
euphemisms) on public airwaves, they were able on their new show to read
verbatim, and to great comic effect, from the obscenity-laced lawsuit
accusing the Fox television host Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment. They
were able to have an old regular, the comic songwriter Stephen Lynch,
perform a song called "Craig Christ," about Jesus' little-known
reprobate brother, which probably would have got them fired by the third
stanza on regular radio. And later, maybe because it was funny or maybe
just because he could, Mr. Cumia recited all seven of the words that
George Carlin once identified as the ones you could never say on
television.
But in an interview later Mr. Cumia, 39, and Mr. Hughes, 37, said that
they were very much aware that doing talk radio in a medium without rules
was, in many ways, as scary as doing one with too many rules and worrying
every day about being fired. On regular radio - where they became the
top-rated afternoon drive program in nearly all male demographics - many
of their antics were shocking and funny simply because they were on a
station anyone could tune in to while stuck on the Long Island Expressway.
But now, with listeners who have bought a satellite radio and paid a
premium and who are eagerly expecting the unexpurgated, what will be
shocking enough? And how can they please new bosses who almost expect
endless outrage?
"That's what scared us," Mr. Cumia said, "because
Anthony and I were trying to prove to them and everybody else out there
that, 'Look, we're not shock jocks.' We hated that term. We do so much
more than that."
And so on satellite radio, he said, the paradoxical result is that they
intend to play down stunts and shock value that were a staple of their old
show. They know that it will become increasingly hard to top their own
record. And they know that when Mr. Stern - their rival, with whom they've
been engaged in a running feud for years - joins Sirius in 2006, the
pressure to out-stunt the competition will only increase. Of course, their
show features lots of language and subject matter they could not have
touched on the public airwaves, but during the show last week, Mr. Hughes
often carefully and sometimes almost primly avoided expletives, using
euphemisms like "freakin' " or "effing" even though he
was free to spew the foulest language they could come up with.
"We've been telling our listeners we don't want them cursing, and
we tell each other: don't curse just to curse," Mr. Hughes said,
sounding far less like the overgrown teenager he sometimes plays on air
and more like the experienced, multimillionaire entertainer he really is.
"I think that takes away from what we are, which is a very funny,
clever, entertaining show," he added. Or as Mr. Cumia put it,
explaining that shock would be strategically rationed, "I think if
you took a show like 'The Sopranos' and every week somebody gets murdered,
it would get old, right?" There's "a shocking element to the
show," he allowed. "But it's what we call the attention-getter.
It's to get people in, to get people to spread the word. Then once they're
in, now they're listening to a show that sounds like a discussion between
their friends, of guys talking about guy things," which means, if
their first shows are an indication, chiefly pornography, body odors,
bodily functions, celebrities, sports, politics and having sex with
prostitutes.
"If you're a real shock jock," Mr. Cumia said, "which is
going on the air every day and trying to shock the public with an animal
execution or some kind of sexploit or something, then you're going to have
a problem, because people will expect and try to see what you're going to
do next." At least at this early stage, fans of the new Opie and
Anthony show seem to be liking what they hear, though some seem a little
disappointed that the show is not more freewheeling and that even on
noncommercial radio there are still promotional spots, for XM.
"The whole point of the boys" going to XM, one fan wrote
recently on a Web site devoted to the show, "was that they get to do
whatever they want and have control over their own show. It really doesn't
seem like they have a lot of control over some of the aspects of the show
(i.e., when to take a commercial break and the type of clips they get to
play during the break). It's kinda disappointing to see something like
this as early as their first week. Sure, being able to curse and talk
about anybody is nice, but why not let them run everything like
promised?"
But the consensus on such sites seems to be that the show is already
beginning to find its stride. "After the first two shows,"
another fan wrote, "I was thinking 'Uh oh, they've lost it just when
I started paying for listening,' but this morning's show rocked. More
please!!!"
Mr. Logan, the XM programming executive, said the show was already
becoming popular, but he declined to say how many people had subscribed.
"Right now our position is that we just don't disclose the
numbers," he said, though he emphasized that he expected to reach 20
million subscribers by the year 2010.
Looking exhausted the other morning (they wake at 3:30 a.m. to do the
show, which they said seriously cuts into their beer drinking), Mr. Cumia
and Mr. Hughes said they felt they were starting to figure out how to be
funny in a world without censors. Or more accurately, in a world where
they were now their own censors, in the name of better humor. Would they
ever take another cellphone call from inside St. Patrick's? "We'd
like to say we have the guts to do anything," Mr. Hughes said,
"but the fact is, no way."
He paused and after a moment of reflective silence, added: "Now if
it was a mosque. ..."
He and Mr. Cumia laughed uproariously.
"Ah, that old gag," Mr. Cumia said.
"Yeah," Mr. Hughes agreed. "That old gag."
