The Smartest Place You Can Get Naked

Jake & Jackie “Naked Girl” – Up until last week, Jake Fogelnest and Jackie Clarke had a radio show on the NYC station formerly known as K-Rock. Since Howard Stern left terrestrial radio for Sirius, the station dropped its rock format, went all talk, changed its call letters, and became Free FM. It seems rather counterintuitive to switch to all-talk after Stern left the station. It only serves to emphasize the lack of their former star player, and wouldn’t it have made more sense to be all-talk with Stern on board in order keep talk radio fans in one place rather than abruptly shifting into a generic rock format as soon as he left the airwaves every day?

Anyway, Jake and Jackie somehow scored a late night show on Free FM. I came to the show fairly late, but most recently, it could best be described as a couple of UCB comedy hipsters co-opting the style and rhythms of loudmouth talk radio without indulging in its creepiest impulses. Fogelnest is barely older than I am, but at this point, he’s a broadcasting veteran of over ten years, and it shows. He embraces his role as a radio crank so fully that he often seems about twenty years older on the air, sometimes even channeling the prickly, charmingly abrasive sensibilities of Bob Grant and Bob Lassiter. What comes through in Fogelnest’s show is a genuine love of talk radio’s energy and off-the-cuff candor, but also an obvious ambivalence about its lowest-common-denominator tendencies. The resulting program is an acquired taste for sure, but it is a gift to a person like me who has always enjoyed the banter of the Stern show but cannot tolerate its casual misogyny and homophobia.

In this clip from last month, Fogelnest and Clarke wrestle with the post-Stern cliche of bringing in a girl to get naked on the radio. After a cute Williamsburg girl offers to take her top off on the air, Jake attempts to rationalize going through with it because he thinks the fact that she is attractive in a way unlike that of the standard radio bimbo is enough to make it interesting. (Let’s call it the “Suicide Girl defense.”) Clarke, however, is not having it. She berates Fogelnest and several callers who attempt to justify what she considers to be an act of degradation. Rather than immediately discredit her feminist point of view, the show embraces that conflict and milks it for comedic effect while also facillitating a fairly thoughtful debate on the topic. Clarke ultimately gets her way, and successfully subverts her role as the sassy yet accomodating female sidekick.

From what I know now, the show has been cancelled by Free FM, and will return shortly, most likely on satellite radio. (Fogelnest and Clarke have made some very strong hints about their destination on their website, but have yet to make a formal announcement.) Archived clips are still available via their podcast on iTunes, and will be apparently be hosted on their website before too long.

(Click here for the Jake and Jackie MySpace page.)