When John and Ken first came on the scene in 1992, I wasn’t impressed. Sure, their show was better than that of their immediate predecessor, Daryl Gates, but everyone knew he was just a placeholder anyway. Compared to their real predecessor, I found them to be only marginally informed about the issues they opined on, much more knee jerk, and a lot less entertaining. Their predecessor was … don’t laugh … OK, do … Tom Leykis. I’m serious. As godawful as his show may be today, kinda like Howard Stern’s, back then his show was quite entertaining, you know, like Howard Stern’s, and informative to boot, also like Howard Stern’s. He screamed fairly often, but rarely screamed at a caller – and almost never blew one up – who hadn’t done something to deserve it. He constantly reminded us which Congressmen had voted to raise their own pay when, and which ones had voted not to. Like Howard Stern, he maintained a decent mix between dirty jokes and serious, useful commentary. And of course he hated to be compared to Howard Stern. As far as I was concerned, unless management had some way of knowing how bad the Howard Stern Tom Leykis show would become a few years down the road, they were idiots to fire him when he did, and bigger idiots still to hire Heckle and Jeckle in his place.

Early on, Heckle and Jeckle staked out their territory as the two who could be jerks to both liberals and conservatives. Gun owners were among their favorite targets, not for actually doing anything, but simply for choosing to own such icky things or, worse still, claiming to have a constitutional right to do so. But liberals got bashed on other issues, as well, and with roughly equal frequency. It was almost as if they thought that being jerks to people on both sides of the aisle somehow insulated them from criticism from all sides, as if equally pungent odors emanating from both the left and right proverbial butt cheeks^* would somehow cancel each other out. The only saving grace of their show back then was listening to them butcher the name of every Southern^** California city with an Hispanic name.
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