The Good New Days

Things change. Nothing lasts forever. Insert whatever cliché about cultural evolution suits you best. The world isn't the same today as it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. We know that. Yet...

Okay, so, I was walking in our neighborhood and I noticed a flyer tacked up in various places for a guy looking for bookings as a comedian and lecturer. The flyer touted the guy as a "nationally recognized comedy historian" who "takes your audience back to that special time when the best comedians were both funny and clean!," and emphasized how he is preserving the legacies of Red Skelton and Laurel and Hardy.

Let's put the effectiveness of booking comedy gigs by tacking flyers up in a random residential neighborhood aside for a moment. (Hint: Nah.) And let's also stipulate that he's clearly looking to reach an older audience. That being said, if you show someone under the age of, say, 65, clips of Red Skelton, would they think he was funny?

Before you answer that and pivot to other things from that era that people WOULD find funny, let me expand on that. When I was a kid, Jack Benny was considered very funny; he's still considered one of the greats, and deservedly so. "The Jack Benny Program" has been airing on Antenna TV, and when it was on early in the morning, I'd sometimes leave it on the TV in my office. What struck me is that for every undeniably funny sketch or segment, there were several that were... not funny at all. Corny, groan-inducing, sure, but not funny. That doesn't diminish the material that WAS funny, but a lot of it comes off as embarrassing now, because society changed and some things that were common fodder back then would engender protests today. I was surprised at how what I recalled as amusing plays very differently in 2023, whether corny or cruel or flat out offensive, like "how could we have tolerated that?" offensive. There is comedy from that era that would still come off as funny to new generations, but much of it is just plain not. It's of a different time. We're not in that time anymore.

And that's okay. We can leave dated creative content in the past, leave it in the archives. It's okay to create things for your time and not for posterity. Red Skelton was fine for 1960. A comedian using Red Skelton's material in 2023, not so fine. Tastes changed, and maybe Red himself would have changed with the times if he was still around, but he isn't and it doesn't matter.

There's a lesson in this for radio. It's remarkable how much of radio is the same today as it was 30 years ago. Morning shows do the same bits. Hosts -- even young hosts, even newcomers -- sound exactly like radio did in 1990, or even 1980. We stress the need for strong personality to reach younger generations, yet the material hasn't changed. Innovation is scarce. Creativity is limited. Talk hosts still echo Rush Limbaugh. Jocks still do the same canned bits and read the same gossip and celebrity news fresh off the prep sheet. Everything is being done the same way it was done decades ago, with the minor addition of reading social media posts and polls. It's not just that there hasn't been a really different new format in years, it's that what radio pumps out every day hasn't changed, either, and that doesn't reflect the listenership, which has undergone vast changes not only in demographics but attitudes and concerns.

Different generations have different preferences. If you're in your 50s or 60s, chances are that you think the cultural tastes of people in their 20s and 30s -- music, TV shows, politics -- are awful, and they think the same of yours. You know how you'll see some TV show or hear a song and realize that it's not for you, it's for another demographic, another age? Yeah, that, and it raises the question of why radio hasn't tried to change what it does to reach the people who listen less or not at all.

And I understand: You don't want to lose the listeners you currently have. You don't want to make changes that blow off your core, and the revenue you're already making. But you also don't want to stunt your growth, either, and not changing to meet the tastes of new generations is a guaranteed way to do exactly that, especially when other media -- podcasts, DSPs, YouTube, TikTok -- are wide open and better reflect where the public's heads are at in 2023.

I don't know whether the guy who posted those flyers is getting any action from them. If there's anyplace where you might find people longing for the good old "clean" days, I suppose it's around here. (Or The Villages, but let's not go there. Literally, let's not go there.) But if you're trying to grow in 2023, you need 2023 material and a 2023 attitude. Nostalgia's fine, but it's not a route forward.

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Different radio, you say? Hear how Jon Grayson of KMBZ/Kansas City and Todd Hollst of WHIO/Dayton are creating a different kind of talk radio, and Amplifi Media's Steve Goldstein on where podcasting is heading, at the All Access Audio Summit April 26-28; See the agenda and register for the all-streaming event here. Clem Kadiddlehopper would want you to be there.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Mastodon @pmsimon@c.im