Style
Although frequently funny and thought-provoking, Lassiter was always caustic, always contrarian, and often downright mean. He typically began his show with a topical monologue that could last anywhere from five minutes to an hour to a full three-hour shift; the monologue was usually designed to incite his listeners to the point of blind rage, at which point he would begin to accept calls from people who were furious to the point of inarticulacy. As he once put it, "It dawned on me that if I talked for an hour, hour and a half, by the time I stopped these people weren't rational. And then I would just rip them to shreds." In fact, Lassiter showed extreme disdain and impatience with his callers, not hesitating to poke fun at them, subtly trap them into demonstrating their hypocrisy or lies, or even to insult them outright. "Get off my phone, you subhuman pig!" became one of his most famous catchphrases.
Lassiter famously began each hour of his show by giving the day of the week, date, and time (e.g., "Six minutes after the hour of eight o'clock; welcome back, funseekers. It's a Thursday night, September the twelfth, nineteen hundred and ninety six.") He also cultivated a number of signature sign-offs over the years. At WPLP he ended each show by saying "Behave yourselves", and playing "Take It To the Limit" by The Eagles; at WLS, he signed off with, "Love you, Chicago"; in his final years at WFLA he closed by playing an extended version of The Blues Brothers' "Sweet Home Chicago" as he continued speaking or answering phones, then finally playing a tape of a caller saying "That's it?...We're done?...well, have a good night then."
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.”
—Anzia Yezierska (c. 1881–1970)