I miss a good laugh in the morning. I mean a real...honest to goodness, spontaneous, straight from the gut, feel-good... LAUGH . I'm sorry if I sound like an old fump...but I swear...morning radio used to be a whole lot funnier. And the entertainers that I remember (and some that I used to work with) were more like comedians than jocks. They were into timing and production values. And, you know, I believe that audiences miss the laughter too. Think about it for a second. It's really hard to find!
What do we offer our listeners today? Well...let's see...we have our Morning Zoo's and show hosts with names like Magpie and Mongo. We've got talent who think that being crude is being funny. We have pranksters pulling outrageous stunts and talent talking trash. And, more often than not. the only people laughing are the characters doing the show! At what point did the definition of 'funny' radio change? Did I miss it? When did we start substituting creativity with crud?
It's probably a lot harder to be funny, in the traditional sense, day in and day out. You'd have to really work on your show. These days it sounds like people just grab their prep, hit the mike switch and go!
Don't get me wrong. There are still people out there who could be giants in the morning; they still have the skills and the talent. But more often than not they've been muzzled by management. The ironic thing is that they're often hired because of their funny personality. They're not actually stifled until after they're employed. They're crunched into a restrictive format and forced to change their on-air approach. They become victims of short-sighted management and it's sad.
There was a time when talented programmers hired genuinely funny people and then they'd let them 'run'. They could make you laugh every morning and they usually did. Now, in these deadly serious times, I sure wish that radio would move in that direction again. We all could use more laughter in our lives.
Those are my thoughts...what do you think?
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