HP-Time.comJoe & Ralph

Is your girl the chubby type? Are her little hands fat and pudgy? Or is she the picturesque, stately type with the long, tapering fingers of a pickpocket? No matter what type she is, you can be sure that so-&-so has the ring for her.

This kind of impudent guff pours out of station CKLW (Detroit-Windsor) for no less than three and a half hours six mornings a week (Mon. through Sat., 6-9:30 a.m., E.W.T.). Through some quirk of the radio waves, surprised U.S. Army pilots on the New Guinea run pick it up, write ardent fan letters. Hosts of Detroiters are equally enthusiastic about The Early Morning Frolic and the pair of wacky mimics who operate it.

No people in U.S. radio have made such a good thing out of insulting advertisers on such a scale as a onetime bookkeeper and dance-hall manager named Joe Gentile, 34, and his childhood pal Ralph Binge, 38, onetime plumber's helper, amateur boxer, and door-to-door salesman. The eleven-year-old program has 40-odd sponsors who paid some $250,000 last year for the privilege of hearing their products and services derided. There is also a waiting list of hopeful sponsors. But last week Gentile & Binge refused to take on any more. They thought that three and a half hours a day was all that anyone, especially themselves, could stand.

Gentile & Binge's success is soundly anchored to a cornerstone of American character: disrespect for pomposity. And the radio industry provides enough pomposity in a day to keep Gentile & Binge in satire for years. Superman occasionally turns up on the program with a heavy Bronx accent. Guest celebrities are interviewed and thrown out of the studio to the sound of a shirt ripping. Weakling children who eat "Tasty Bread" will not merely grow strong, they will begin juggling locomotives. A new electric iron is just the thing for straightening out crumpled car fenders, etc. Gentile & Binge repeatedly make advertising copy writers wonder if they have been hired under false pretenses.

Four Buckets Behind. Outraged advertisers occasionally phone in to protest such maltreatment of their product. They get nowhere. Gentile takes the calls in the studio and lets his listeners hear the argument. One sponsor who knows better is a clothier named Conn, who has used the program for eight years. Conn likes to recall that he was once a coal miner and came up the hard way. Gentile & Binge seldom let him forget it. They usually corrupt his program with: "Come on, Conn, you're four buckets behind." Sponsors may get mad, but most of them find that this wacky kind of advertising pays.

Frolic is produced in "circumstances that would paralyze most radio performers. Gentile & Binge invent their patter as they go along. The studio is just across the hall from the elevator, and people constantly pop in to ask the way to the manager's office, the men's room, etc. Some get yanked right into the program. So do many night-shift workers who drop in for laughs in the early morning. President Alexander Grant Ruthven of the University of Michigan, a devoted listener, once asked the boys to find a horse which had strayed from his stable. They broadcast an appeal to the horse to go home because he was breaking the president's heart. Twenty minutes later a listener found the animal.

So far Gentile & Binge's talent for absurdity has boomeranged only once. Gentile was so struck by advertising copy for a brand of coal that he ordered five tons from the dealer. It refused to burn in his furnace, and he had to shovel it out of the basement. In revenge, he introduced a shoveling sound into all of the coal company's radio time. The sponsor has never understood why.

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