Howard’s wild blue yonder

HE came upon America with all of the grace and finesse of mad cow disease, catching us off guard as we strolled through life, whistling a little tune. He was just another mouthy DJ at first and then, like a microbe suddenly identified under glass, he became (run, scream!) Howard Stern. And now he’s infecting outer space.

Any day he will proclaim himself not just the king of all media, but also king of the cosmic realm, due to the chilling fact that his voice is being bounced to us from a satellite orbiting the woebegone planet Earth. Space aliens, scanning the stars, will pick up his obscenities and come to believe we are a strange breed of life form that, among other oddities, worships disquieting sounds emanating from our bodies.

Stern’s rise from landlocked radio personality to planetary force has come about due to his obsession with just about everything disgusting and demeaning, and from the Federal Communications Commission’s inability to see the humor in repeated flatulence sound effects.

With the FCC on his (bleep), he was not just run out of town but run off the planet. Sirius Satellite Radio, which beams its words and music from up there, beckoned, and Stern rose to a level beyond the small admonishments of secular law to a place where now he can say just about anything he (bleeping) well pleases, God help us all.

Stern’s new eminence was greeted by the earthbound media as a physical phenomenon equivalent to the discovery of a new moon, even before he actually began his show last Monday. I came across his face in Manhattan where it adorned the cover of New York magazine, all dour and curly-haired, like a grown-up version of Shirley Temple gone to drugs and booze. Beneath the picture were the words “Howard Stern, Free at Last.”

Then he cluttered the cover of Esquire magazine (“Howard Stern Rips Us a New One”), and after that he seemed to be everywhere, even in the L.A. by God Times. Stern, like a dark cloud over grace and subtlety, had restored mindless wit to the airwaves.

The final intrusion on my grandfatherly sensitivities came the other evening as I channel-surfed to avoid him and came across the film “Private Parts,” the story of his life, more or less, on the USA Network. There, he was telling a woman passenger on a plane, as he has told magazine interviewers, that he was misunderstood. Misunderstood? I was amazed. Is there anything to misunderstand about the word (bleep)? I don’t think so.

I greet his return to prominence the way one might observe the presence of a moth in your face, with a sense of both detachment and annoyance. Well, there’s incredulity too, based on an inability to perceive how any creature, moth or man, could gather an audience of millions selling humor based on bodily functions. When I posed the question to a friend, he replied, “Because he was first.”

It is also, I think, because he fits right into the strident nature of our age with televangelists, far-right commentators, discordant music and mad zealots of various persuasions bellowing in our faces, employing just about any device to get us to listen. Stern has gone beyond being a simple “shock jock” to a position of being able to institutionalize the kind of humor we usually grow out of by the time we’re in ninth grade.

It is no surprise, I guess, that 10,000 culturally deprived people would line up at a Pasadena bookstore in 1993 to have him sign their copies of “Private Parts,” the collection of written words that spawned the movie. In an area of about 10 million people, that is only an anomalous fringe of the general population, comparable, perhaps, to the number of those among us who suffer from Tourette’s syndrome, causing them to involuntarily twitch, spit and swear.

Stern has become so much a part of the nation’s, forgive me, entertainment world that one need only utter his first name to know who is being mentioned, the way the single word “Frank” in Las Vegas neon once announced the presence of Sinatra on stage. A billboard on Fairfax Avenue with a sexual connotation proves my point. If you detect a note of envy in my tone, it is only because “Al” in lights would never be recognized as belonging to anyone other than, say, the half-witted character on “Married ... With Children.”

A colleague, Martin Miller, discovered from a website called the Family Media Guide that in Stern’s first show on satellite radio, he and his cast outraged human decency 740 times with instances of ... well, you know. They also used the dreaded f-word 77 times and, as almost an aside, cursed God’s name nine times. God, being a tolerant neighbor, ignored him.

That is precisely what I intend to do because, like certain terminal diseases, there’s no cure for Stern at the moment. Perhaps new research will be able to alleviate the symptoms that cause people like him to voluntarily and with suppressed giggles shout “Bleep!” in a crowded church. Only when the disease is conquered and the man outgrown will we have all evolved beyond the need to be entertained by flatulence.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. He can be reached at [email protected].