He was born to be jerky.
The founding father of prank-call comedy legends The Jerky Boys credited his personal mother and pa for uplifting his insane characters – and now he’s able to take his profession full circle.
Johnny Brennan is planning to go again to the large display screen 30 years after the discharge of “The Jerky Boys: The Movie,” this time enjoying his father Tony in a biopic tentatively titled “Don’t Hang Up” about his uncanny rise from New York wiseass to a wisecracking popular culture phenomenon within the Nineteen Nineties.
“If you spoke to my father, it was just a normal guy just speaking like I’m speaking to you now,” he informed The Publish in a latest interview, the day after he acquired the script.
“But when my dad got pissed off that’s when Frank Rizzo came out,” he stated, then flipped the swap into the acquainted voice of his foul-mouthed, short-tempered alter ego. “And things [came out] like, ‘Hey get over here, you f–king rubberneck f–k.’ But he would only speak that way when he was pissed off or when it was time for one of us to get a f–king asswhooping.”
Chronically nervous Sol Rosenberg was only a riff on his mom, Gloria, whereas different characters have been based mostly on uncles or others he got here throughout rising up within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, he stated. His characters had New York accents and used phrases he heard rising up like “sizzlechest” whereas sprinkling in new quotes of his personal like “skid plate.”
His father and mom — who died in 2000 and 2017, respectively — didn’t thoughts the notoriety, Brennan stated, even when a Maxim journal reporter laughed in his mom’s face when she spoke and Rosenberg’s voice got here out.
Brennan, who’s now 63, informed his mom it was all “pretty extraordinary.”
“Just by me copying your voice and knowing that you were f–king hysterical, you know we were able to touch the world with these characters I’ve created, based on the family,” he stated.
Lengthy earlier than Brennan went to the highest of the Billboard album charts together with his former partner-in-pranking Kamal Ahmed, he stated he was already inflicting hassle in an enormous Irish household and a family that he describes as “nutty as a nuthouse.”
He was the oldest of 5 rowdy siblings and a category clown at Mater Christi faculty in Astoria earlier than his household packed up and moved upstate to a ranch home in Salisbury Hills within the Nineteen Seventies.
He began recording himself and he remembers his dad as soon as strolling in on him whereas he taped a twisted audio skit on his reel-to-reel about his aged neighbor getting run over by a lawnmower – screams and all.
“I say, ‘Dad I’m just making some s–t. I’m making some tapes and whatnot,” he stated, earlier than unleashing the Frank Rizzo voice once more. “He goes, ‘Jesus Christ, boy, you’re a f–king nut.’ And then he would go out and shut the door.”
By the late Nineteen Eighties, the home-recorded prank calls had unfold by way of bootleg copies of cassette tapes from his brothers to their mates – then throughout the nation. The off-the-wall tapes had unsuspecting “victims” on the opposite finish attempting to make sense of weird eventualities, together with a name the place Brennan-as-Rizzo tries to purchase balloons to drift his youngster round a celebration “like a pinata” – although he worries the child would possibly float away into the sky.
The viral-before- viral comedy act was so huge that the pair hit the large display screen in 1995, with a plot that concerned Rizzo calling the Mafia and a forged that included Oscar-winner Alan Arkin.
The film wasn’t a essential or industrial success, which Brennan partly blames on a large snowstorm that hit the northeast the weekend it premiered – however followers have caught with it through the years, he stated.
“We had a great f–king time with that film and I think we have more of a following for that Jerky Boys movie now than ever before,” Brennan stated.
Brennan downplayed any rift or arduous emotions between him and Ahmed, regardless of stories in Rolling Stone and elsewhere of unhealthy blood when he left the act within the late Nineteen Nineties to pursue filmmaking. However Brennan admitted the entire recreation had modified when he set solo out in recent times.
“The people are not the same. First of all, nobody picks up the phone anymore… and if they do pick up the call, they’re waiting to be pranked or ‘is this some reality show,’” he stated. “This time I had to literally do anywhere from five to 20 calls to get a call on a subject I was going to use.”
However the calls actually only a car to get his characters out into the world, he stated. New automobiles embrace his standard Cameo web page, the deliberate biopic – written by Billy Narducci and produced by Wolfden movies –and even a Seth McFarlane-produced documentary on The Jerky Boys, he stated.
He’s honored that after 40 years later, followers nonetheless come as much as him with weird requests.
“‘‘Hey Johnny if I call my brother can you tell him you’re gonna wrap his head in with a f–king ratchet?’” he stated, quoting one in all his character’s notorious threats.
Followers generally apologize for bothering him with the bizarre requests, however he stated he by no means will get jerky with them.
“‘What do you feel bad about?,” he stated. “I created something that the people f–king love, they love that s–t, they loved it for decades.”
