Radio Provocateur

But really, Hendrie is something like a cross between a stage hypnotist and a bullfighter: stage hypnotist because his act relies on real people who don’t realize they’re performing, bringing a rare spontaneity to delicately plotted comedy, and bullfighter because he shows only enough of the cape to keep the bull enraged. To turn and wave a giant red flag would be an insult — if not to the bull, who would after all just be summarily slaughtered, then to the audience gathered to judge the aesthetics of his movements. And he never, ever backs down.

“You’ve got to separate the callers from the audience,” says Hendrie, 52, a large bald man whose Hawaiian shirt, carny’s squint and the single gold hoop in his left ear suggest Mr. Clean retired to Maui. “The audience is out there like you, like normal people. The callers are the unwitting members of the cast. And many of them think that they can control or manipulate the flow of the show simply by saying, you know, ‘I had a son who died of cancer.’ A lady called and said, ‘My son was run over by a car, and I don’t think you should be doing this.’ And the character said something like, ‘Oh my God, last night about 6? It was me, I hit your kid!’ The butt of the joke is the person who was foolish enough to think his experience is going to be respected, just because he believes it profound enough for the world to take notice. I think the reason why a lot of people like the show is because we test the credibility of anybody who calls. We don’t back off; we just push it.”

“I’d put him up there with Stan Freberg, Bob and Ray, Firesign Theater, and Harry Shearer as people who have used the medium of radio to do incredibly theatrical things,” says Matt Groening, a die-hard Hendrie fan who keeps boxes of old tapes on hand for his frequent commutes. “But Phil is in a league of his own, because Phil is working in the slimiest lower intestine of the medium. He’s on with those yammering right-wing dimwits on KFI. And that his show completely deconstructs what the rest of them are doing every day just makes me laugh.”

All of this, of course, would be so much meta-critique if Hendrie weren’t consistently hysterical, in a way that TV comics with 10-person writing staffs have trouble being for a 23-minute half-hour: Astrophysicist-stoner Jeff Dawder offers to drive his own excrement down to the wastewater-treatment plant; fussbudget Bobbi Dooley shoots neighborhood cats loudly having sex because cat sex should be consensual; Latin lover Rudy Canoza reports that women are helpless when seduced by the Argentine “sexual exclamation point” of repeating “lalalalalala.” Sitting in on live tapings of The Phil Hendrie Showhas become something of a pilgrimage for comedy royalty: Howard Stern has been down, as have Groening (with musician David Lindley), George Carlin, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean (two-thirds of Spinal Tap), and June Lockhart (?!). Actresses Laurie Metcalf and Glenne Headly, both gifted mimics, met Hendrie early on for a Bloody-Mary-and-mimosa-fueled breakfast that turned into lunch that turned into dinner and finally early-morning drinks, opening the gates to Hollywood proper. R. Lee Ermey called in one night to complain about a guest who claimed Full Metal Jacket was based on his life; Hendrie didn’t let him in on the gag, but he did get him to do a few lines as the Drill Instructor. Most recently, at Aspen’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in March, Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David and Jeff Garlin enthusiastically approached Hendrie after a live broadcast, where David reportedly called him “a fucking genius.”

“An Utter Failure”

Hendrie was born and raised in Arcadia in the east San Gabriel Valley, one of four children in an upper-middle-class Catholic family. (At one point, he served as an altar boy at Arcadia’s Holy Angels Church, but claims he was kicked out when he couldn’t remember the name of the priest’s vestments.) His father was a salesman who made it to Los Angeles in 1950 after serving in the Canadian army during WWII, just in time for his youngest son to avoid becoming one more Canadian gift to American comedy. By the time Phil was 12, the postwar economic boom had subsided, and his parents’ marriage quickly followed suit. “In the process, my dad blew through a lot of money,” he says. “He was very good at making it — my dad made a lot of bread — but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what to do with it.”

After his father moved to Europe and married another woman with four kids of her own, the family home was repossessed and Hendrie spent his high school years sleeping on the couch in a tiny rented apartment. “Our home really became the House of Usher,” he says, “this suburban middle-class dream just beginning to decay like Dorian Gray. Now there are weeds growing up in the yard, the swimming pool is starting to turn green, and the cute little boy named Phillip that everybody used to see in the neighborhood suddenly has long hair, is smoking cigarettes and looking surly and pissed. And I learned two things: Not to trust money. And probably not to put too much faith in family either.”