A Quick Thought on Originality and Corby

My time and ability to be by the station has been limited lately.  Sorry that new posts have been few and far between.  Hoping that will ease soon.

The prior batch of comments contains some interesting reports on Fan filching of Ticket bits, some of them of long-standing and not even that frequently heard on the station any longer.

I thought of this when I was able to catch about an hour of The Hardline today.  I heard Corby's new bit, Bad Follow-Up Question Guy.  (I don't have that quite right -- it wasn't "Bad," was it?  Someone here will remember.  Yeah, maybe it was.)  He was interviewing a Cowboy hopeful, a second-year guy, I think, whose name I did not catch.  Corby was doing a legitimate interview, the guy was responsive and cooperative, but after every response, Corby would throw in a complete non-sequitur, sometimes a random remark, sometimes a question, would pause for a moment, and then would go on to a legitimate question.  The guy eventually caught on and chuckled some at what he probably figured out was a bit.

I'm not a big fan of Ticket ambush interviews, but I gotta say that I laughed at this.  Corby's non-sequiturs were masterful, and delivered with just the right offhanded lack of emphasis.

This made me think about the comments we had on RaGE swiping old Ticket bits.

Corby came up with a successful original bit.  Why can't RaGE?

This got me thinking about whether Greggo or anyone on RaGE could even have performed that bit if it had been given to them.  I don't think so.  Oh, they could have tried it, but it would have fallen completely flat.

Why?  Because of Corby's unique talent for manufactured sincerity.   He gets his share and more of ballbusting by readers here, some of it accurate (although sometimes overheated, in Your Plainsman's view), but this is a true gift, and I don't intend this opinion as damning with faint praise.  It's what makes him the best interviewer on The Ticket.   Who else on Dallas sports radio could have drawn superstars like Shaq or impossible interviews like Parcells into some really great radio?

I hadn't intended this entry as a celebration of Corby, although I'm always glad to be positive about The Little One.  My point started out to be that it isn't just bad decisionmaking that keeps The Fan down -- it's a major talent gap.   I've said it, we've all said it in one way or another:  In the words of an early commenter on this site, The Ticket is lightning in a bottle.  Whether the assembly of the host lineups throughout the day was brilliant on the part of the station's founders and early managers or merely fortuitous, we should enjoy the hell out of it while we can.

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I'll try to catch The Train Station Fitness Show tomorrow to see if George Di addresses last week's much-remarked-on interaction with his somewhat addled guest.

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WEBCAM QUICK HIT: My Lord, with Corby's Hair Long, Parted in the Middle, and Smashed Down on His Head with the Headphones . . .

.  .  .  he DOES look like Ruth Buzzi!

Sorry, I don't know how to snag images off the webcam.  If anyone does and can grab one of Corby, pass it along and I'll copy it in here, with thanks.

Or, if anyone has any pictures of Corby looking like Ruth Buzzi.

PS:  Confessor triplespluscv  (many thanks!)  was kind enough to snag an image of Corby that gives you a bit of a flavor.  The head-on shot would show Corby's very nice part in the middle, which adds to the Buzziness of the look:

My Ticket Confession

Your Plainsman tries to be fair.  Sometimes this consists of taking shots at some of the showgrams and some of the hosts.  As ardent listeners, the stuff that stands out for us is the stuff that irritates, even though most of it is great.

I don't know what happened today.  I've been a little logy lately, under the weather, and kind of had that la-de-da sensibility that comes from mainlining DayQuil.  Maybe it was because I'd had a good meeting with one of my numerous bosses.  Maybe it was because I'd knocked off work early for no good reason.  Maybe it was because a checkout lady at the supermarket insisted -- even after I denied it -- that I was a well-known national television figure.  Swear to Jah.

Whatever it was, I have this to say:

I thought The Hardline was incredibly good today.

I smiled, I laughed, I cackled, I chortled.  The highlight was when they announced some giveaway of tickets to a cowboys-of-color rodeo.   Almost drove off the road during that exchange.   All of the hosts were on their game, all were funny, the coarseness was kept to a minimum.  The "Tom Sawyer" E-News segment also stopped me down.  The Joel Jenista reminiscence was perfect.

Your Plainsman (among others) gripes about Hardline show nonprep, vulgarity, over-Corby, Mike R's early retirement -- but jeez, these guys (and Danny "Wool Hat" Bacon and that Nice Young Michael Gruber) are pretty incredible broadcasters.  I thought about that scene in "The Fugitive" where Harrison Ford is keeping just a few scrabbling steps ahead of the train wreck that's advancing on him -- that's The Hardline at its best, and it was at its best today.

Despite the fact that all of us (cowardly, anonymous) media experts have a list of stuff we'd like to fix, The Hardline is an astounding radio showgram. 

That, among other admissions I sprinkle in here from time to time, is My Ticket Confession.

The Corby + Shaq Show?

Yesterday, Corby reported that while on vacation he had received a call from someone purporting to be a representative either of Shaquille O'Neal or Sirius/XM Satellite Radio. The caller stated that Shaq was slated to do a radio show for the network and had suggested Corby as a possible co-host. Corby was modest and claimed not to be interested; Mike urged him to follow-up on it.

This would be an extremely cool call to get. And the whole Corby/Shaq friendship arising out of Corby's radio-bit approaches to him, seems genuine and is makes for great radio when Shaq's around. What I found interesting, though, is that Corby, scammer extraordinnaire, did not betray the slightest suspicion that maybe, just maybe, he was being set up.

Chances are, he wasn't. Chances are, the guy on the phone gave sufficient evidence of his bona fides that Corby concluded it was the real thing. Still . . . prolific scammers really need to be alert for their victims looking for opportunities for vengeance. Could even be Shaq setting him up . . . .