The first thing Johnny Brennan wants you to know is that he did consider waiting another year. “A couple of weeks ago I thought maybe I should hold on to this,” he told me, drifting into the warm gravel of a man who’s been prank-calling America since we still answered landlines. “Then I said, ah, bullsh—this is exactly the time to get it out.”
You don’t need Brennan to explain why, but he does anyway, because he’s a mensch. “If there’s ever a year people need a little extra humor, it’s this one.” And with that, The Jerky Boys—absent from the official release schedule for roughly 23 years—came back with a new album, brand-new sketches, and more of those voices that somehow became as familiar in the ‘90s as anything on the radio.
Brennan didn’t exactly leave. He kept deploying the characters for commercials, cameos, and the odd Budweiser spot. But making an actual album again—that took fans, celebrities, and a whole generation of people now old enough to say “my dad showed me this” all asking the same thing: Johnny, when are we getting more?
“I guess I took it for granted,” he said. “You don’t really know how much it means to people.” He talks about Cameo messages where grown adults beg him to prank their fathers, brothers, uncles—“they grew up with me,” he laughs, almost surprised. “If I can make people feel good, why not do more of it?”
Even Brennan will admit the magic isn’t the prank format—it’s the characters. They aren’t caricatures; they’re family members he lightly mutated into comedy weapons. “When I do Sal Rosenberg, that’s my mom,” he said. “Frank Rizzo is my dad when he was pissed off. Kissel is my Uncle Vincent, a WWII vet.” He’s repeated this origin story for years, but hearing him tell it, you understand why the impressionists have never caught up: he’s not doing voices, he’s animating entire human beings.
“Howard Stern said it best,” Brennan recalled. “‘There will never be another Jerky Boys because Johnny is doing real people.’” He can barely get through the story of Seth MacFarlane calling him from traffic—hunched over, pounding the steering wheel in laughter—because the Jerky Boys tapes still knocked him out decades later. “He said it was f—ing timeless,” Brennan said. “Those were his exact words.”
That timelessness shows up in the new album, where you get everything from confused hair-salon workers to a guy who genuinely believes Brennan hand-crafted a grand piano. The new characters come from the same place the old ones did: Brennan talking to himself. In the shower. Driving. Anywhere. “I don’t think about it,” he said. “I might start doing a voice without knowing, and then I stay in it. On this record I’m talking to myself in character, bragging about this piano project like it really happened.”
It’s also somehow comforting hearing Brennan talk about “victims,” because he hates that word. His favorite calls aren’t the ones where people yell back—they’re the ones where someone, often a perfectly pleasant human being, just goes along for the ride. “As long as we’re engaging, it’s beautiful,” he said. On one new track, a man with a voice like a retro announcer becomes the perfect partner for Sal Rosenberg’s Bikram-goat meltdown. On another, Brennan finally meets someone who outlasts him. “That never happens!” he said, half-admiring, half-appalled.
He’s dealt with people worrying about political correctness. “I can’t help you,” he said flatly. “If you’re out to be offended, I can’t help you.” He’s not attacking groups, he notes, and he never has. “Everything is self-deprecating humor. I put wacky characters in absurd situations—that’s it.” He remembers a 1993 smear campaign that labeled The Jerky Boys “offensive to everyone,” then watched Tipper Gore plaster warning labels on the albums and accidentally sell millions more.
As for getting recognized during a call, it happens. Rarely, but it happens. Once, a guy caught him mid-Frank Rizzo. “He goes, ‘Frank! Frank Rizzo! Jerky Boys!’ And I’m like, what’s that?” Brennan stayed in character, walked the guy in circles, and let him doubt reality for just a few more seconds. “Sometimes,” he said, “people really do know that voice.”
The best news for longtime fans: this isn’t a one-off. Brennan already has leftover material from the new record—and leftover material from the leftover material. And the old longform tracks he never released, he’s pushing those out too. “I’ve got stuff to roll right into another record,” he said, sounding genuinely charged up.
Before we wrapped, Brennan made sure to shout out the fans—the ones who lined up around blocks in the ‘90s and the kids now swarming him at Comic-Cons. “I think they’re there for Family Guy,” he said, “and they go, ‘No way, man, we’re here for Jerky Boys.’ Their dad showed them. Their mom showed them. It’s incredible.”
Then he did that Brennan thing—soft, sincere, a little stunned that all this ever happened. “I don’t have to tell you how far they go back with me,” he said. “I’m really glad I did it.”
Watch the interview above and then check out a call below.
