THE JERKY MOVEMENT

IF SOMEONE ‘phoned up and started hurling abuse at me, chances are I’d put them on hold, get my mate at Telecom to trace the call and then go round their house with a tube of KY Jelly and insert the handset into a place normally reserved for trunk calls – if you catch my anatomical drift.

Were this verbal G.B.H. to be directed elsewhere, however, I’d laugh like a drain and cadge enough 10 pences to embark on my own wave of telephone terrorism.

“Yeah,” agrees wind-up merchant extroadinaire Kamal, “it’s definitely better making those kind of calls than receiving them but the idea isn’t to insult people, just have a bit of fun. There’s a certain unwritten code of ethics. For example, if the person who answers the ‘phone has a stammer, you don’t crucify them for that because, hey, it’s not their fault.

“On the other hand,” he adds mischievously, “if you ring a piano tuner and tell them you need somebody to come round and extract a Rotweiller from your baby grand and they fall for it, you show no mercy. You go for the sucker’s jugular!”

You mightn’t be able to enjoy a quiet pint these days without the gormless student type next to you bellowing, “look at that crap joke, that’s you that is”, but rest assured, in 1994, our third-level friends will be uttering an altogether higher class of one-liner courtesy of Kamal and his Jerky Boy chum Johnny B. You’ll get to know characters like the take-no-shit Frank Rizzo and simpering Sol Rossenberg who’ve already wooed over half-a-million Americans and earnt the Jerkies a Grammy nomination. So how did a couple of Brooklyn lads get to follow such a strange career path and do their mothers approve?

genitals rubbed

“Myself and Johnny B have been hanging together since we were kids and, you know, whenever we got bored we used to ‘phone up the pizza parlour and get them to send six Pepperoni & Mushrooms round to the neighbours – nothing too severe. Anyway, Johnny got a job in construction, it was raining one day and they couldn’t work, and he had the idea of making a few calls and taping them. I made a few myself, our friends heard them and wanted copies and it grew from there.

“The first time I realised there were bucks to be made out of it was a year later when I was sitting in a bar and this group, who weren’t even from New York, were laughing about the skits. Then all these rumours started circulating with different people taking credit for the idea and that’s when we decided to go looking for a record company.

“As for your final point, our mothers don’t care as long as we promise not to ring anyone they know or reveal our true identities. The shame would be too much to bear.”

A Jerkies album now ranks alongside a Sega Megadrive, a year’s supply of fresh underwear and a catering-size pack of raspberry-flavoured condoms as tour bus essentials. We know about comedy being the new rock ‘n’ roll and all that but is Kamal surprised by their cult status?

“It’s incredibly flattering,” he enthuses. “Radiohead named their Pablo Honey LP after one of our characters and I’m told that when they’re travelling between gigs, a lot of bands prefer listening to us than music.”

Bearing in mind the current emphasis on political correctness, have the Jerky Boys ever incurred the wrath of the senator’s wives or found their telephone box picketed by religious fundamentalists?

“We’ve got characters who are gay, characters who are Jewish, characters who are Egyptian . . . but that’s purely a reflection of the type of people who live in New York. My father was from Bangladesh, I’m proud of that, so how can I be a racist? The fruitcakes who accuse us of that sort of stuff obviously haven’t listened to the record.

“What they need,” he concludes thoughtfully, “is to have their genitals rubbed with garlic. That’d sort ‘em out.”

Er, strange people these Americans!