Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Glenn Beck: Theater, Madness, McCain and Clydie Clyde

Katie Couric is turning Barbara Walters with her new web show. In her first webisode below, Katie's first guest Glenn Beck is theater and madness. Salon's Alexander Zaitchik, who's working on a book about Beck, has been writing about how Beck came to be a spewer of hate.
It's about time that someone shone a light on this guy. Beck's mother drowned when he was 15. Beck called it a suicide and he has struggled with the same things his mother battled--drug addiction, manic fits of depression and thoughts of suicide. What's interesting to me is people take him seriously and they can't see they he's one foot inside of a mental breakdown.
Read part one here and part three is here.
Here's some interesting excerpts from part 2 of 3-- Beck's imaginary friend:
Like dozens of stations launching generic zoos around the country, Beck's first morning show was titled simply "The Morning Zoo." It wasn't a playbook zoo, as it lacked an ensemble, but it had a zoo spirit. It was fast-paced and featured skits and fake characters voiced by Beck. Beck's main cartoon character was named Clydie Clyde, a Muppet-voiced alter ego who sounds like the love child of Yoda and Kermit the Frog. Today the descendants of Clyde live on without names. Beck lapses into voices to imitate anyone he doesn't like, while going boggly-eyed and waving his hands around like he's slipping on a banana peel. (Clyde was based on the most widely imitated such character at the time, "Mr. Leonard" from Shannon's New York Zoo team.)

"Beck's Corpus show was just him, Clydie Clyde and the news reader," says Tod Tucker, who hosted the slot following Beck's at KZFM. "He was extremely talented and he knew it. At first we didn't get along because he was so arrogant, but we became friends. He always talked about going to New York City and making it big. That was his dream."
Beck hated black people long before Obama:
With Dries across the console, Beck directed a rotating ensemble cast and wrote or co-wrote daily gags and skits. Among the show's regular characters was Beck's zoo alter ego, Clydie Clyde. But Clyde was just one of Beck's unseen radio ventriloquist dolls. "He was amazing to watch when he was doing his cast of voices," remembers Kathi Lincoln, Beck's former newsreader. "Sometimes he'd prerecord different voices and talk back to the tape, or turn his head side to side while speaking them live on the air. He used to do a funny 'black guy' character, really over-the-top."

"Black guy" impersonations were just one sign of the young Beck's racial hang-ups. Among the few recordings of "Captain Beck and the A-Team" archived online is a show from February 1986 in which Beck discusses that night's prime-time television schedule. When the subject turns to Peter Strauss, an actor known for starring in television's first miniseries, Beck wryly observes, "They say without [Strauss' early work] the miniseries 'Roots' would never have happened." Clydie Clyde then chimes in with an exaggerated and ironic, "Oh, darn." The throwaway dig at "Roots," which chronicled the life of a slave family, wins knowing chuckles from Beck's co-hosts.
He has always been childish:
It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.
Beck turns Super Patriot:
The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- but even then his politics were anything but tie-dyed. After opening the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Beck played patriotic music through the morning. The only track receiving multiple plays was a New Wave-ish spoof titled "Qaddafi Sucks." The song was a huge hit with listeners, dozens of whom called Beck to tell him how inspired they were by his patriotism. Caller after caller applauded him for "standing up for America." When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. "I personally don't think we did enough," he says. "We should've went over there [sic] and bombed the hell out of 'em."


Watch CBS Videos Online
Conservative Joe Scarborough, one of the few conservatives who is an adult, says Beck is bad for conservatism.