I review the new audio “album” of their Redondo Beach two-man show:
Radio creates a one-of-a-kind intimacy between host and listener, so both men have cultivated profoundly loyal, if dramatically different, fan bases. It’s fun to picture elderly Jewish ladies shuffling past tattooed frat boys in the lobby of the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center. Fans from both camps came from as far away as Arizona and Hawaii to see and hear their heroes.
As an example of the fond relationship fans have with Carolla: When he mentioned his Guatemalan nanny, you can hear someone say, “Olga!” (In Toronto, a photo of his step-grandfather flashed on the screen and half the audience bellowed the old guy’s nickname, “Lotzi.”)
Likewise, Prager’s listeners came to know his parents, Max and Hilda, over the years. Listeners looked forward to his mother’s annual appearance on the show, and they expressed their grief when she passed away. Meanwhile, the saga of Prager and his unlikely one-time fan [and the former “Matt Drudge of porn”] Luke Ford is an object lesson in fandom gone horribly wrong.
Perhaps because of that very loyalty, I detected a little friction between the “teams” during question periods...
