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March 23, 2000 | Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life
(And the Eight Realities That Will Save You) By Dr. Joy Browne
It's a Jungle Out There, Jane: Understanding the Male Animal By Dr. Joy Browne Crown, 248 pages
Not long ago, these two birds inhabited such different regions of the dial that their opinions seldom collided. As the traditional daytime gal, Dr. Laura razzes the working stiffs, including mothers who have the kinds of jobs that allow them to listen while they drive, cook, iron or type. Dr. Joy, in contrast, has always been the psych babe for the desperate hours, crooning through the midnight road trips, the insomniac intervals with crosswords and Scotch. A couple of years ago, though, something began to shift in the Dr. Laura habitat. Her feckless listeners -- the ones who provided the juicy entertainment -- realized she was going to shred them every time, and stopped calling. There would be no more "I've dated this girl for two months and now she's pregnant; do I have to marry her?" no more puzzled roué pondering his conquests on the air and suddenly bursting into tears. Now her show is all people who want to discipline their pastors and outlaw co-ed camping, salted with dispatches from ex-spouses screwing around with each others' visitation schedules. Meanwhile, Dr. Joy has been flying reconnaissance missions into Dr. Laura's airspace. She landed a daytime TV show months before the one promised Schlessinger by Paramount. Not only that, but in some key locales, Joy's radio gig has been moved to daytime, enabling listeners to toggle back and forth between the two. Now you can compare them more closely than ever before. Joy and Laura never mention each other by name, but for those who closely observe their behavior, it's obvious there's a covert rumble going on. They'll be ramming each other head-on any minute. Dr. Laura is naturally irritating to begin with. Her voice evokes the high-pitched "whaaang!" a skinny board makes when you rip it with a table saw. Not that we can blame her for that: Early listeners will remember her frustrated joking about having to take singing lessons. She really should consider not ratcheting up the aural pain any further, though: Her robotic disco theme song (by Patti LaBelle) is so screechily out of tune that Quincy Jones' music director once faxed the show, begging Dr. Laura to find something else. Schlessinger's an East Coast gal originally, but she displays a showoffy gloss that seems like it was picked up during her conquest of L.A. A photo of her in Vanity Fair showed her flexing her stringy muscles next to her pool in a Bob Mackie-looking jeweled evening gown, her glittery blonde hair teased into a foofy helmet. Her cutesy lingo -- "Boonchkin" means child, "warmies" are sexual attraction -- doesn't help, either. A dispassionate listener might conclude that in her world, there's something morally expedient in having a tin ear. Dr. Joy, from New Orleans, can afford to disagree. Even on a bad day, she sounds like Eve Arden mouthing off to James Stewart in "Anatomy of a Murder": mature, smoky, wryly secretarial. She talks too fast, but it adds to the impression that the weight of her knowledge makes her nervous. This cagey woman does her broadcasting from New York, which gives her a tastier range of sonorities in her callers; weary Brooklynese trumps flat-voweled Californian any time. Browne's also the only radio talk-show host to slip the Ink Spots and Esquivel into her bump music. Dr. Laura could smear Dr. Joy in a snowball fight, no question: Schlessinger has a black belt in hapkido, after all. But on the tube, Browne's got some pair of legs to go with that voice. Furthermore, her attacks of silliness in front of her studio audience make her fascinating and vaguely alarming to watch, like a continuously exploding soufflé. A typical episode has her listening to a man whose affair, he claimed, was an accident. He hadn't meant to have sex. It just happened. "Oh please!" Browne bellowed at him, jumping up so fast in her agitation that she nearly fell over backward. "You have to unzip your pants" -- she gesticulated wildly, whirling her arms like windmills -- "You have to whip it out" -- grand penis-presentation gesture here -- "It doesn't just happen!" Try that in an Ann Taylor suit sometime.
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