Last month, Media Matters surfaced a litany of racist, misogynist, and creepy comments that Tucker Carlson made from 2006 to 2011 on shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge’s radio show. Carlson’s attempts at dropping his Brooks Brothers floor manager persona to sound like a regular joe are pure cringe comedy. He passes off his now familiar white nationalism as comedy, calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and arguing that the Congressional Black Caucus “exists to blame the white man for everything.” But in one call, he throws even Bubba and his crew by defending child marriage, saying that cult leader Warren Jeffs facilitating the marriage of a 16-year-old girl to an older man “is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her.” “Yeah, it’s—you know what it is?” one of Bubba’s co-hosts responds, genuinely creeped out. “It’s much more planned out and plotted.” “That’s twisted!” Bubba’s co-host shouts over Tucker’s stammering rationalizations. “That’s demented!”



Carlson’s attempt at locker-rooming with the cool seniors only ended up clearing the locker room. Not long after the Media Matters story broke, many of the advertisers on Carlson’s highly-rated, if severely revenue-challenged, hour of Fox News prime time left, too. The irony is that when Carlson went on Bubba’s show to hang with the bad boys, it was to attract advertisers. In 2006, politicians and pundits regularly went on these shows to say edgy things or laugh at them, in a bid to appear less like the humorless stiffs they are, and expand their audience to a younger demographic.

Shock radio is a broadcast genre in which extreme, aggressive, explicit talk is meant to outrage the mainstream public while making the show’s devoted fans laugh. It took off nationally in the 1980s and ’90s, when the term “shock jock” applied interchangeably to a handful of radio personalities—Bubba, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern among them—who had distinct audiences and often loathed one another, but shared a taste for the wildly irreverent. Since then, however, the spirit of shock radio has come to animate the political language of modern times, transforming from fart jokes into today’s “triggering the libs” culture, which ranges from anti-Semitic 4Chan memes of concentration camp ovens to President Trump’s relentless trolling of Kim Jong-un, LeBron James, and pretty much everyone else. And no one has mastered that language like our troll-in-chief. How the merger of right-wing politics and dick-joke comedy came to pass is a story about Donald Trump, yes, but it has its roots in the late days of the Reagan administration.

While local shock jocks like Chicago’s Steve Dahl were already established in the 1970s, the shock jock era truly began in August 1987, when the Reagan Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made two changes that literally rewrote the rules of American media and comedy. First, it repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which required radio stations to balance controversial views with an opposing point of view. Rush Limbaugh was already the top-rated show at Sacramento’s KFBK and a veteran of “insult radio” when the doctrine was overturned, finally freeing him to do the show he wanted.

Limbaugh could now be as controversial as he liked without liberal pushback (or context, or fact-checking), and his now familiar menu of right-wing satire and conservative dogma quickly connected to likeminded listeners. Within a year, WABC brought him to New York to begin his national show. To break up his daily three hours of super-villain monologuing, Limbaugh introduced news about Ted Kennedy with a song called “The Philanderer,” a parody of Dion’s “The Wanderer.” And in an early example of a conservative mocking liberals as the real fascists, he began referring to feminists as “feminazis.”