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I used to love listening to him late at night in the dark.

His stories never cease to amaze. That he does it weekly is even more astounding.

Yes indeed. Joe Frank is one of our consistently underrated treasures.

Among the Joe Frank shows available for listening at www.joefrank.com, I particularly recommend: "An Enterprising Man," "Escape from Paradise," "Holy Land," and "Road to Calvary." In "Holy Land," there are two hilarious bits (at 32 and 46 minutes in) involving a crazy preacher haraguing confused people on the phone.

I just heard Joe's show and I must say, it's the most self-indulgent load of pointless twaddle I ever laid ears on. He led in with a superstale routine about getting caught having sex Clinton style with an intern (not Monica Lewinski, but Melissa Loewenberg or something, how terribly clever), all of it borrowing from old news headlines and too straightfacedly lame to be funny, or fresh, or even have an edge. Then phone messages from cool LA cynic-neurotics meandering on about tickets to screenings and openings and call-me-or-I'll-call-you-or-anyway-someone-call-someone-because-I-have-no-life-off-of-this-phone. Then a call-in with some coo coo nut fundy preacher, another stale archetype, who just keeps ranting in the utterly expected manner (including gratuitous anti-Semitism) while Joe responds in the fashionably flat, ennui-ridden, I've-had-my-balls-cut-off-by-public-radio style of delivery associated with Ira Glass and everybody else who makes it onto Ira's show. Then some simple-minded, charmless, faux-naif fables about kids who get magically sick because their dad is away and writing lying letters, and hippos who color the sky with birds and stuff whenever they yawn. All of it laid down over a soul-killing monotonous disco tape loop to remind you that it's that burned-out, media-saturated kind of LA cool. After a headful of this audio dishwater, I had to throw the radio across the room, fire up the CD deck and listen to Count Basie for an hour before I stopped feeling the psychic dry heaves enough to go to bed. What am I missing here? Am I simply unworthy of approaching the sheer genius of this dysthymic wreck of a man? Or are all his buttkissing acolytes just getting off so much on the ennui and dark coolness of it all that they can't see what a colossal nobody he is? I notice nobody who has anything positive to say about him is at all specific, just trite terms like amazing, astounding, etc etc. Leading me to suspect that you're all fooling yourselves. Somebody, please, help me out here...