Howard Stern (the fancy lady in the gold lamé dress) and Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin (who is thankfully censoring Stern’s lady bits) have been feuding for a long time. In affidavits filed today by Stern and his agent Don Buchwald, more details about their argument are emerging. The awesomely-named Allison Hope Weiner of Deadline got her mitts on the affidavits and reported the lawsuit is regarding the performance-based stock awards written into Stern’s contract before the merger of Sirius and XM. The contract gives Stern bonuses in the form of stock if the number of subscribers added to Sirius each year exceeds certain targets.
Stern says he wasn’t paid his stock awards for 2008 and 2009 despite exceeding those target numbers of subscribers. Sirius XM is arguing that XM subscribers don’t count as subscribers, even though the original contract (written when there was some talk of a possible merger) didn’t specifically rule them out. As Stern puts it:
“I do not understand how the company can brag to the world that it has more than 20 million subscribers, and then turn around and tell me that only half of them count. All of these subscribers are subscribers of Sirius. Sirius has pointed to them as a measure of the company’s success, and the whole purpose of the performance-based stock awards was to allow me to share in that success.”
Well, he’s got a point, but more importantly, he has a funny show. After the jump are a few of our favorite moments from that show. We tried to keep it safe for work — so the “Sarah Palin audiobook” and the infamous Carmen Electra video which cost her a big cosmetics endorsement were left out of course — and we stuck mostly to clips under ten minutes:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/qAxBFpc8kPI?version=3&hl=en_US
Instead of filling this list with every great Billy West clip (meaning all of them), we’ll just post West’s first appearance on the show, where he was being interviewed as a senile Lucille Ball.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/MpE1AG9SmFU?version=3&hl=en_US
This is part one of Gilbert Gottfried and Howard Stern doing dueling Jerry Seinfeld impersonations, which eventually leads to them talking to a woman who used to date Seinfeld. Later in the video they leave several voicemail messages on Seinfeld’s phone.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/pNX7bkdDDTQ?version=3&hl=en_US
This is part one of a seven-part series about the Jesus Twins, a pair of meglomaniacal brothers who haranged their way onto the show to audition their song “Feel the Ubiquity” for the Private Parts soundtrack. It might not surprise you to hear one of the brothers (Jeff) was working as a dog trainer in Texas as of 2008. In that same year the other brother, Eric, committed “suicide by cop” in Los Angeles.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/uK7WC11nBC0?version=3&hl=en_US
Here’s a compilation of Jackie the Joke Man Martling laughing at the suffering of others during a serious news read.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/PcH7afsy4z0?version=3&hl=en_US
This one might be a little too inside baseball, but Billy West impersonating fellow wack pack member Jackie the Joke Man Martling usually made for good radio.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/K5E8hKnRQXI?version=3&hl=en_US
Any list like this would be incomplete without a clip from the day Artie Lange quit the show. This is part two of I don’t know how many parts. Part one is unnecessary; this show made no logical sense and part one doesn’t explain Lange’s meltdown either. Artie Lange should be getting a bonus based on how many days he’s been able to stay alive. How does he do it?