Radio Dinner

RADIO DINNER
 
 
National Lampoon Radio Dinner  is a comedy album from National Lampoon that was first released in 1972.  The humor on the album was very much steeped in the pop culture of the era and includes such subjects as game shows (“Catch It and You Keep It”), the 1972 presidential election (“Profiles in Chrome”, where the Democrats nominate a Pontiac GTO to run for office while then-president Richard Nixon counters by transforming into a car himself), and popular music parodies such as “Deteriorata” (a parody of Les Crane’s “Desiderata”) and “Pull the Tregros”, a parody of Joan Baez.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
At the beginning of (Santa’s Got a) Bomb for Whitey by the Lovemasters is a bit of wacky but intriguing dialogue. I found precisely one reference to it on the Internet, a blog post by A. Templeton Goff answering a question about a different skit. He says: “[It is by] the Credibility Gap, the first group that featured Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and David Lander (McKean’s partner from Laverne & Shirley). It’s from their album A Great Gift Idea. . . . Pretty hard to come by these days (it’s never been released on tape or CD), but it’s well worth the effort to find. IMHO, it ranks with National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, and Stan Freberg’s United States of America as one of the all-time great comedy albums.”
 
As laid out by A. Templeton Goff, the dialogue is taken from a sketch by the Credibility Gap called Kingpin, the story of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. if told in a “blaxploitation” film. (Only the first two lines plus the fistfight are actually on the Lovemasters album):
 
BUS DRIVER: Sorry, fella, you’ll have to get to the back of this bus.
KINGPIN: Listen, you honky-donkey! No one tells Kingpin to get back!
(Sounds of a fistfight)
BUS DRIVER: I . . . I thought you were nonviolent, Kingpin!
KINGPIN: Sure, man. Only when I’m . . . dreamin’!
 
(March 2016)
Last edited: March 22, 2021