I was on a conference call last week with a former co-worker I hadn’t spoken to in years. The conversation was normal enough—business updates, the usual “how have you been” choreography—until I slipped into a voice I’ve apparently been carrying around since the 1990s. I asked a question in my best Jerky Boys imitation, and there was a two-second pause on the line. Then he started laughing and said, “I knew I recognized that voice.” It was a Jerky Boss reference, and suddenly we weren’t two middle-aged professionals anymore. We were idiots again.
The Jerky Boys were everywhere in my life. College, law school, work—it didn’t matter where I was, there was always a small underground society of people who could quote Frank Rizzo the way other people quote Shakespeare. You’d be sitting in a library carrel pretending to study torts, and someone would whisper, “I’ll come down there and choke ya,” and half the room would lose it. It was the unofficial language of procrastination.
At law school it reached ridiculous levels. A group of us were so committed that we went to see the Jerky Boys movie on opening day like it was the premiere of Star Wars. We were grown adults with casebooks under our arms, standing in line to watch prank calls on a big screen. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not ashamed. Those voices were the soundtrack to surviving cold calls, outlines, and the general anxiety of becoming a lawyer without any idea what that meant.
What I love most is how the jokes never really left. Decades later, one silly impression on a conference call can collapse all the years in between. The Jerky Boys weren’t high art, but they were a secret handshake for an entire generation, and apparently that handshake still works.
