his is how Kamal Ahmed responds when I tell him, via Facebook, that I'd like to talk about Johnny Brennan: "He's still doing the same thing like a 51-year-old idiot and I make independent movies that deal with the struggles of man . . . I went on to more meaningful things."
There's clearly some unresolved bad blood in the 17 years since Ahmed left the group, slipping a "goodbye" note to the guys' then-manager. But their initial partnering wasn't nearly as passive. Brennan was pulling a classic "Johnny" when he decided one day, as a 12-year-old kid, to take his sister's life-size doll, strap a bunch of football gear onto it, head to the roof of his Astoria, Queens, apartment building, wait for a car to drive by, then . . .
"Bam!" Brennan recalls. "Next thing you hear, the car skids, hits the doll and everybody's fucking screaming and yelling. I liked to do pranks that people looked at and went, 'This kid's out of his fucking mind.' The lady across the street had a heart attack."
Ahmed, five years younger than Brennan, was present at the scene of the accident, and immediately drawn to the latter's, let's call it moxie. The two were fast friends. In the late Eighties, Brennan was working odd construction jobs in New York that had him up incredibly early in the morning, spreading hot tar across apartment building roofs. (Tarbash, the name for Ahmed's best-known character, an Egyptian magician, is a nickname Brennan and his brothers would throw around while tarring: "Hey, Tarbash, get more tar!" That kind of thing.) He lived in Middle Village, Queens, and would stay up all night making prank calls to entertain friends. Ahmed would come by really late, after finishing gigs as a Lower East Side bouncer or playing bass in a band. They would record the calls and laugh their asses off.
I liked to do pranks that people looked at and went, ‘This kid’s out of his fucking mind.’
-johnny brennan
"When we first started, it was just fun," Ahmed says. "There's stuff on the first two albums that we were together [where] you would hear some good interaction between us."
One day, Ahmed had an idea. He started passing out copies of these tapes within the music community and to people who came by the club. The consensus was unanimous: They loved the Jerky Boys before they were even called the Jerky Boys (Brennan's mom christened the group with its name just before its 1993 debut album). Through a kind of audio samizdat those tapes were bootlegged and spread throughout the country. Having heard them became a measure of comedy cool. "It felt very pure and raw, like you were in on a secret," says Schumer, star of the hit Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer. "I was blown the fuck away by [the Jerky Boys], because it was people fucking with real people â€" no giving a shit about consequences."
Once they began to earn recognition, says Ahmed, his relationship with Brennan started to sour. Ahmed claims that his and Johnny's management team kept telling him to be happy as a sidekick, and that they even tried, on multiple occasions, to have him replaced. But Ahmed stuck around because he had fond memories of staying up late at night, goofing around, doing those calls for nobody but themselves. "The best was when there was no money, nothing, when we just used to hang out and do it as a complete good," he says wistfully.
Well, there was also the fact that his father guilt-tripped him into sticking it out. "In 1991, I went with my father to Bangladesh, where he's from," says Ahmed, "and right when I was telling a story saying I was going to quit, we saw children so poor that they were eating garbage from the street. [Ahmed's father] stopped the car and said, 'You see that? That's how people got to live in the world. In most of the world, that's how people live. If you quit something where you could make a couple of dollars, I'll disown you.' "
Ahmed made it until 1997 before leaving for good. Post-Jerky Boys, he pursued filmmaking. He's directed three features and is working on editing his fourth, Laugh Killer Laugh, which he says is a "a neo-film noir about a jewel thief/hitman for the Mob who awakens from a coma with a changed personality after being a milquetoast."
Talking with Ahmed, its easy to get the sense that he believes there's a grand back-and-forth between the two founding Jerky Boys â€" a real he-said, he-said beef. But Brennan doesn't speak ill of Ahmed. He respects the guy for branching out into film, and acknowledges that the group wouldn't be where it is without Ahmed distributing the tapes and inventing his own characters. "Kamal is responsible for getting these tapes out, and before you know it, I was getting phone calls from cousins that were up in school in Buffalo and they were like, 'John, your stuff that you did is everywhere,' " says Brennan. "The next step, Howard Stern, all the biggest DJs in the country are playing my stuff."
Brennan has a lingering memory of the last time he saw his old partner. It was at a Jerky Boys record-store-signing session, held shortly before Ahmed quit. There, Ahmed gently and unexpectedly held Brennan's infant daughter in the air, so that the assembled adoring fans could see the beautiful Jerky baby. When the signing was over, the two went their separate ways, and haven't been in the same room since.
"We were better together than apart," says Ahmed matter-of-factly, "that's for sure."
hough there's little chance of a Jerky Boys reunion, the brand's standing in the comedy world has never been stronger. "They were creating these worlds," says Scott Aukerman, host of the popular Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and IFC television show. "These characters resided in them, so the people on the other end of the line don't realize they're in the middle of a sketch. The Jerky Boys transcended messing around with someone."
Schumer remembers how she set out in middle school to emulate the Jerky Boys. She took an empty camera, and, pretending to be a yearbook photographer, asked classmates to pose for a series of embarrassing shots. (She'd never even loaded the camera with film.) Today, her show's woman-on-the-street interview segments are shot with the Jerkys' quick-witted audacity. "Just that unapologetic committing to it," she says, "and having the person just look into my eyes to see if I'm fucking with them. That's a lot of Jerky Boys."
Paul Feig, who in addition to Bridesmaids directed the Melissa McCarthy/Sandra Bullock film The Heat and was co-creator of the much loved TV show Freaks and Geeks, took other lessons. "I was visiting my parents in Michigan when I saw the Jerky Boys' movie," he remembers. "They were so aggressive, languagewise. Some people get their angst out by playing first-person shooter games. To me, because I like being so polite, [The Jerky Boys] was such a release."
Feig was in such awe of the Jerky Boys' gift for dirty language that he's since always strived to incorporate as much ribald humor as possible into his work. Directing McCarthy in The Heat, for example, he felt comfortable pushing her toward the same cackling catharsis he felt as a kid at that theater in Michigan. "When a swear word comes in, it's going to make something funnier if it's at a smartly inappropriate moment," he says. Referring to the Jerky Boys, he says, "The idea of calling up a guy trying to get a job, and you're just swearing a lot is inherently funny â€" it's just like a clueless guy, or a guy who can't control himself, or a guy who doesn't know how to exist in the real world. Anarchy is always funny."
EVERY TIME WE WANT TO GET PAID, WE HAVE TO THREATEN A LAWSUIT OR AN AUDIT, AND THE MONEY COMES FLOWING OVER. IT'S A NIGHTMARE, THIS FILTHY BUSINESS.
-johnny brennan
What anarchy is not, though, is ironic. Today's biggest comedy stars â€" Louis C.K., Tina Fey and Amy Poehler leap to mind â€" are not afraid to ramble about how they feel; they're more interested in throwing emotional wrenches in the machine than snark or sarcasm. The Jerky Boys inadvertently predicted this cultural shift, away from the ironic 2000s and toward the purity that captivated Aukerman and Schumer.
Even during the 2000s, though, there were pockets of Jerkys humor. The natural successor to the prank-adjacent throne was Johnny Knoxville's Jackass series of films; it shares the Jerky Boys DNA of stripping humor down to unscripted authenticity. Crank Yankers, which ran on Comedy Central from 2002 to 2005 and featured prank calls that were then enacted by puppets, was Jerky Boys to the core. Same with MTV's timeless punching bag Punk'd.
"[The Jerky Boys] captured that the simplest ideas are the best," says Sal Vulcano, one of the stars of TruTV's Impractical Jokers, a show where four Staten Island boys prank one another. "There have been prank shows that have been really elaborate," he continues, "setting up fake car accidents and burglars. For us, we wanted to strip it down completely, didn't want to do anything that someone else couldn't do â€" a lot like the Jerky Boys."
There's influence, and then there's access: The Jerky Boys have never been easier to hear. Though Brennan and his team are working to wrangle all the YouTube videos under one channel, they're not terribly worried about the potential adverse affects of piracy. In fact, it's quite the opposite. "YouTube has been great exposure," Brennan says. "A whole new generation of people is discovering the Jerky Boys."
They found them at the perfect moment. Brennan has untested characters he wants to try. He has unreleased calls he wants to release. He wants to show that the Jerky Boys are not something that happened once, long ago. They're here, grinding and relevant. Standing in that Manhattan office and getting on the phone, inhabiting Sol Rosenberg and Frank Rizzo and Jack Tors for the first time in so many years, has given Brennan renewed hope for wreaking phone havoc.
"It was kind of magical," he wrote to me in an e-mail after undertaking the new prank calls. "Everything culminated in this last piece of the puzzle. I left there that day feeling awesome. It was like someone was guiding these pieces into place."
In other words, keep an eye on your caller ID, liver lips.
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