That’s what’s up.
Holy shit, the Papa John’s prank call on the 6-12-12 show KILLS me. Usually prank calls make me cringe more than anything but god damn, that was something else.
like i said, pre-kyle archives are shit because he does like one prank call a year and most of the time its him trying to entertain co-hosts who are too busy looking at their phones/laptops to join in on the fun. honestly you could just make an entire 2010s era adult swim show just based on his rantings. just imagining going to the gym or subway or detroit and its exactly like it is in his insane rants.
mike is by far the best at just straight up prank calls, and by that i mean not LPC style wacky prank calls, or whatever. Even his most low effort, retarded prank calls are just way funnier than anyone else i've heard doing prank calls. I was listening to an episode from last season the other day (
https://redbarradio.net/shows/red-bar-radio-s19-e11 its at 27:30 ) and he talks about getting lots of hate online for being a jew and he's tired of it, so he calls a christian church and asks if they would be willing to convert him to christianity, which sounds like a boring premise, and it is just a throwaway stupid idea mike had, but it was funny as fuck. Then another where he finds out Geno's playing at some club in chicago that night and he calls the club pretending to be geno and tells him he doesn't feel like showing up, and then calls geno's phone and leaves a message telling him they cancelled the show on him.. which again, sounds stupid, but it had me in tears.
the reason mike's prank calls work vs LPC or crankyankers is that its just straight up not fun or cute. there is no whimsy, mike's more of a comical psychological horror, like cartel execution videos where its just outside of our reality but still plausible. he's not playing a character, outside of being a slightly more absurd version of a nasty jewish customer.
like a quick phonecall mike does at a resturant he's a dick but not outside of your average karen and he just keeps ramping it up until he's telling people to burn in hell and get raped or whatever. I think the best simple way to talk about that is when he calls this gym over christmas and the person says "happy holidays" and he rudely tells her Hanukkah is over and she clearly means christmas and as a jew he's offended by that and later on accuses her of antisemitism and being racist because she won't tell him about the whereabouts of a black coworker. he's just straight up telling people off or ruining people's careers.
like in a recent episode he talks to a bartender and again everything the employee says is wrong but its plausible. there's one on youtube about him finding someones camera and then deleting their photos while on the phone with the person, and its great because of that edge of reality to it. thats why the premise can sound boring but it turns out good, like him calling a restaurant to ask if they still carry an item, because he's always such an asshole it takes what would be a boring quick call and transforms it into 10 minutes of madness.
there was this old video of him calling popeyes for their thanksgiving deal and its just like i said, he just goes full obnoxious rude jew. the employees can't speak right, they don't say the right info, they don't follow SOP, they fuck up and he just calls them out all over. on the rare times he doesn't get one over on someone its because the other person on the line is cool, collected, and does their job properly.
something that is great about redbar is that its blatantly sadistic, he will just go off on everything from store chains, to youtubers to employees for everything they do wrong. like on the 2010 marathon show on the archive he's talking about service merchandise and its insane how he describes it. mike is also the greatest describer ever, better than any book because his stream of consciousness gives a better picture than anything from any novel, you know what he's talking about despite you never going there. the low quality ads, the weird sales, the outlay of the store, the employees, the bizzare array of items, the awful gimmicks and the terrible merchandising, "its like they found the items in an alley and decided to just sell it to you" "anything you can fit in a bucket $20"
youtu.be
