The Ultimate Jerky Boys Collection

The Jerky Boys

(Select Records)

Is your refrigerator running? Well, better go catch it.

Compared to the antics of the Jerky Boys, such a joke is merely the work of amateurs untrained in the finer art of prank calling. The Jerky Boys—John G. Brennan (aka Johnny B.) and Kamal (Ahmed)—have perfected crank calling into an art. Unfortunately, it does not necessarily follow that this art belies either good taste or talent. This Grammy-nominated duo’s latest release, The Ultimate Jerky Boys Collection, is their third compilation, a two-disc set consisting of fifty-one of their supposed best recordings of prank calls.

The Jerky Boys exist as the result of two New Yorkers capitalizing on shared amusement of recording crank phone conversations and too much free time. Their 1993 debut album, The Jerky Boys, was the first of its kind and a best-seller. Since their debut, the Jerky Boys have released four more albums, two other compilation albums, two movies, and a book.

Fans will delight in the Jerky Boys familiar characters, like the abrasive Frank Rizzo, voiced by Johnny B., whose defining characteristic is an unnecessary overuse of a four letter word rhyming with “puck,” the memorable Sol Rosenberg, an annoyingly shy, neurotic, Jewish man, á la Woody Allen, and the hilarious transsexual Jack Tors. Kamal’s participation is comparatively limited to infrequent characters like Tarbash the Egyptian magician and Ali Kamal.

Beneath the explicatives there is little to find amusing. However, when not cringing to Frank’s language, a few chuckles may unwillingly escape while listening to such notable calls like “The Gay Model,” where “Jack” tries to find work as a disfigured model whose act includes setting himself on fire and pulling chairs out from his nether region. Still, the majority of the prank calls are like “Pet Cobra,” a mixture of offensive stereotyping (in this case a man with an over-the-top Indian accent who’s bitten by his cobra while charming it with a flute) and an overall difficulty and aggression.

However, it must be conceded that the reactions of the prank callees are somewhat amusing. It is unfathomable how the Jerky Boys were able to convince a woman that her son frequents a nude beach in “Sol’s Nude Beach.” Equally jaw-dropping, but hardly side-splitting, is that a lawyer stayed on the phone for upwards of two minutes listening to a foreigner sob about being beaten for delivering a pizza to the wrong door in “Pizza Lawyer.”

But the only people more gullible than those who are the butts of these prank calls are those who buy this CD.

—Emily Ga Wei Chau

DFA Compilation #2

Various Artists

(DFA Records)

This week saw the coinciding arrival of two promo compilations of distinctly different bents. One was a Warner Bros. compilation of popular songs from their back catalog remixed by current artists called What is Hip?; the other was a three-CD package called DFA Compilation #2, containing remixed tracks from the New York’s independent DFA label. One of these two label-oriented discs held remixes of such “classics” as Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and Devo’s “Whip It;” the other remixes of bands such as Black Dice, the Rapture, and DFA’s house band LCD Soundsystem. One of these CDs was deemed relevant to today’s rock soundscape; the other found its content position in the throw-away bin without much fanfare. Needless to say, the youth brigade of the DFA won the day, and “What is Hip?” was proven a rhetorical question, if not with the answer its distributors intended.