Joe Pyne

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Joe Pyne (December 22, 1924 – March 23, 1970) was an American radio and television talk show host, who pioneered the confrontational style of hosting in which the host advocates a viewpoint and argues with guests and audience members.

Joseph Pyne was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father Edward was a bricklayer and his mother Catherine was a homemaker. Joe graduated from Chester High School in 1942, and then enlisted in the Marines, serving in the south Pacific, where he earned three service stars during World War II. In 1943, during a Japanese bombing of his Marine base, he was seriously wounded in the left knee. In 1955, he would lose part of that leg due to a rare form of cancer.^[1]

Out of the service, Pyne attended a local drama school to correct a speech impediment, and while he was there, he decided to give radio a try. (The 1940s were still an era when local radio ruled (before the post-World War II rapid expansion of television), and small stations were eager to give new announcers a chance.) He briefly worked in Lumberton, North Carolina before he was able to come back to Chester and get hired at a new station, WPWA in Brookhaven, but got into a dispute with the owner and was fired.^[2] As he told an interviewer in a 1959 interview, he then got a job at radio station WILM-AM in Wilmington, Delaware, the first of three times he would work at that station. His next stop was WVCH, another new station in Chester, which went on the air in March 1948. Not getting paid much and seeing little chance to advance in Chester, he left after 1½ years, and went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he was hired at WLIP, owned by a local businessman named William Lipman (hence the call letters.) After six months of hosting such innocuous programs as "Meet Your Neighbor" from various Kenosha neighborhood grocery stores, he quit during a confrontation with WLIP management after throwing Lipman's typewriter into the wall. He found work at several stations in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but by then, something was changing in his own style of broadcasting.

Gradually, he had gotten bored as just a disc jockey, and began making comments about politics and current events. From that, he developed his on air persona as an opinionated guy who knows something about everything. He returned to WILM in Wilmington, where he debuted as a talk show host in 1950. (He would later tell reporters that he first experimented with two-way talk during his time in Kenosha.)^[3] But what cannot be disputed was that his new show was unique. He named it "It's Your Nickel", referring to the fact that back then, a phone call from a pay phone cost a nickel. The format of "It's Your Nickel" was for Pyne to offer his opinions on various topics. Listeners would then call in to ask questions, offer their own opinions, or raise new topics. At first, Pyne didn't put the callers on the air-- he paraphrased for the audience what the caller had just said. But it wasn't long before the callers, and his interaction with them, became the heart of the show. Pyne became famous for arguing with or insulting listeners he disagreed with. One of his most famous trademark insults was to "go gargle with razor blades."^[4]

In the early 1950s, television was replacing radio as America's primary medium. In 1954, Pyne moved to television with The Joe Pyne Show broadcast by WDEL-TV in Wilmington. In 1957, he moved to Los Angeles and hosted a radio show first on KABC, and later on KLAC. This led to a television show in LA as well, on KTTV. In 1965, he began broadcasting a nationally syndicated show which was broadcast by approximately 85 television stations and 250 radio stations at its peak. At the height of his fame in the 1960s, he was making $200,000 annually.^[4]

Pyne spoke out against racial discrimination and supported the Vietnam War, ridiculing hippies (a favorite target), homosexuals, and feminists. Though generally a conservative, Pyne came out in favor of labor unions. But his constant tendency towards insult and vitriol offended most of the critics, who called him "outrageous" and described him as "belligerent" and "self-righteous."^[5] Groups like the Anti-Defamation League accused him of catering to bigots. Audiences, however, kept listening and watching. Joe Pyne was difficult to ignore.

Because Pyne was so rude and confrontational with guests, often attempting to throw them off, there are stories of the rare times when somebody got the better of him. For example, there is a much-quoted story about how he lost a verbal duel with Frank Zappa; he insulted Zappa by saying, "So I guess your long hair makes you a woman." Zappa responded with "So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table." The problem with this story is that while it sounds plausible, nobody who was around at that time recalls it happening, nor is there any evidence from that era that Zappa was ever on the Joe Pyne show. Nor do internet re-tellings of the story offer any proof from the time it allegedly occurred, leaving historians to believe it is an urban legend.

On the other hand, there are many documented cases of Pyne getting into altercations with people on his show. He preferred controversial guests, and invited members of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as American Nazis, and followers of Charles Manson. He claimed this was educational, since it exposed these groups to the public eye.^[6] The Joe Pyne show was not just verbally aggressive; at times it could get physically violent, with chairs being thrown at him by someone he was interviewing. If the "discussion" got too heated, the guest would often walk off or Pyne would throw the guest off the show. And yet, Pyne once described himself as an "overly compensating introvert."

There is another much-quoted confrontation that may or may not be an urban legend. It involved Paul Krassner, who was in fact a guest on Pyne's TV show. Pyne started to make insulting remarks about Krassner's acne scars. Without missing a beat, Krassner asked Pyne if his wooden leg caused any difficulty in having sex with his wife. As the story goes (and Krassner has told it numerous times), Pyne was flummoxed, so he went immediately to get comments from his audience, pretty much made up at this point in his career by whatever shopping bag ladies and bums KTTV could rope in from Hollywood Boulevard. At the end of this long line of audience carps happened to be Phil Ochs, whom Krassner had brought along to the studio. Ochs very calmly remarked, "What Paul Krassner has just done is in the finest tradition of American journalism." Here again, what video exists does not show this particular incident, but Krassner insists that it did occur and was edited out.

Pyne had a phobia of never shaking anyone's hand. His line was "don't touch me unless you love me". Other famous quotes of Pyne:

He suggested a caller "take your false teeth out, put them in backwards and bite yourself in the neck."

"Look, lady, every time you call this program and open your mouth to speak...nothing but garbage falls out...get OFF THE LINE, YOU CREEP." (This "get off the line, you..." line continues to be used today by hosts such as Bob Grant, Mark Levin, and WFMU's Tom Scharpling.)

“I could make a monkey out of you but why should I take the credit?”

Ron Karenga, an African American author, Marxist political activist and founder of Kwanzaa was a frequent guest on the show.

In 1966, NBC gave him a daytime game show, Showdown. It lasted only three months and was replaced by The Hollywood Squares, which would run for nearly fourteen years.

A chain-smoker who on-air referred to his cigarettes as "coffin nails", Pyne developed lung cancer near the peak of his career and died in Los Angeles on March 23, 1970. He was 45 years old.

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• Tv party: Joe Pyne