Crank Yankers’ Best

When I spent a year in London back in the mid-80s, one of my all-time favorites was the BBC show “Spitting Image,” which was a brilliantly savage satire on all manner of public figures using puppets that, after a while, looked more like the people they were satirizing than the people themselves.

There was a short-lived American take on this show that I was fond of. Apparently a lot of people aren’t familiar with the Comedy Central show Crank Yankers, which uses puppets to portray people involved in prank phone calls. My favorite involved a young woman who called into a strip club and pretended to inquire about a job. After informing the management of her measurements, she told them there was one catch: after a glitter-mascara accident, she was completely blind. She knew this would not be a problem, because she had trained her seeing-eye dog, a German Shepherd named Busch, to go from table to table collecting tips! She went on to explain that she would do just fine as long as the bar did not use strobe lighting, because strobe lights made Butch go ballistic. The management finally began to get suspicious when she threatened them with a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act.