"JOHNNY BRENNAN"
“Characters. It’s always been about the characters, from day one,” Johnny insists. “It was never about the phone. That was merely the medium which gave the characters their form.” This wacky group of different personalities is the bedrock of “The Jerky Boys” project and now, hundreds of characters later, “The Jerky Boys” project still thrives, as albums continue to sell and Johnny enjoys a solid voice-over career.
It started in the late 70’s - early 80’s, when Johnny was still working in the construction business. He had just received a speaker phone as a gift and one day, while searching want ads for a pickup truck, an idea popped into his head. Before long, he was playing tapes of his uproarious phone calls for family and friends. A “900” line soon followed and a number of the comedy routines were then compiled into an album and released on an independent label. Each new character started to come alive as a lead player in each of the hilarious comedy sketches. And that’s how the characters were first introduced to the legions of Jerky Boys’ fans.
Since the release of the first bootleg tapes and debut CD, The Jerky Boys characters have surely inspired imitators. “I remember sitting in a box at Shea Stadium one day, just sitting there, not for an event or anything,” Johnny explains. “And I heard two fans jeering one another. ‘Hey sit down there sizzlechest!! What are you some kinda toughguy? I’ll wrap your f@$#* head in with a ratchet if you don’t watch your step!!’ That kind of thing. I’d hear it all the time, in all kinds of places. What a feeling. Incredible. Who knew?”
The characters’ names, in addition to the phone calls themselves, are often created spontaneously. When inspired to name Frank Rizzo, Johnny’s very popular Italian-American toughguy persona, Johnny didn’t even realize Philadelphia had had a long-time mayor with the same name. “And to do Rizzo is not a stretch,” Johnny claims, since Rizzo is basically based on Johnny’s memories of his father when he was chasing Johnny around the house, looking to give him a good ass-whooping. Johnny then tossed in a few “toughguys,” “sizzlechests” and “nutty-asses” to complete the character.
Product Summary: The first five Jerky Boys albums of clandestine prank phone calls have sold well over ten million copies worldwide. Two of the albums were awarded Best Comedy Album honors at the NARM convention for two consecutive years -- not too shabby, especially when you consider that much of the material on those albums had previously been bootlegged three times as much as any Grateful Dead tape. The second album went gold in eight days, was nominated for the Best Comedy Album Grammy Award and raced with and beat out Radiohead’s debut “Pablo Honey” album, (actually named after Jerky Boys’ creator Johnny Brennan’s Cuban character on “Jerky Boys 2,” for the number one spot on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. Subway Sandwiches pounced on the opportunity to use the Jerky Boys characters to sell their sandwiches via the use of prank calls to their shops nationwide. In addition, the The Jerky Boys assisted Anheuser-Busch by boosting Bud Light sales via the use of over one hundred and fifty actual recorded pranks - used for various radio and television spots. Over fifty of these pranks have been used to date. Several of these spots won the coveted Mercury Award, given to the best commercial of the year.
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