Jackie "The Joke Man" Martling is best known as the head writer on the Howard Stern Show, and it's no secret that a lot of the raunchy stuff that comes out of the mouth of Howard has first come out of the mind of Jackie. A proud purist of filth, Jackie is a walking encyclopedia of bad taste, not to mention a one-man cottage industry of CDs, cassettes, videos and other salable material (www.jokeman.com; 1-800-323-KING).

Jackie was last seen at Just for Laughs in 1993 ("I had a killer two nights so they immediately booked me back eight years later"). The Mirror talked to him shortly after he'd put in another gruelling shift on the Stern show.



Mirror: Did you ever take a scientific count of how many jokes you know?

Jackie Martling: It's somewhere between 10,000 and 10 million. There's so much crossover between jokes that it's hard to tell. Jokes about two nuns are the same as jokes about two Indian squaws, Catholic jokes can be the same as Polish jokes...

M: Do you figure your audience knows what to expect from you?

JM: Oh yeah, they know I'm gonna be horrible! But they also know there's nothing serious about it whatsoever. I'm just telling dick jokes. It's nothing somebody wouldn't tell them at the office, at least before sexual harassment took over. I don't know how anyone tells a good dick joke at the office anymore.

M: But as a comedian, can you get away with more now?

JM: Maybe the bar has been lowered and everything's a little dirtier, but it really hasn't changed that much. The rules are still the same. Comedy comes from discomfort: you set up tension and you break the tension. And dirty jokes still work better. A really funny joke that's clean is just not gonna get the laugh of a really funny joke that's a dick joke. And that's because of the discomfort and the release of tension.

M: Will you tailor your material to suit different audiences?

JM: When I first started, people used to say, "Jackie, there are older people in the crowd tonight. Be careful!" And I'd say, "Don't be silly, the older people loooooove my dick jokes." It's the people who are on a first date who freak out when I talk about blowjobs. Other times, people would say, "Jackie there's a black guy here tonight." I'd say, "Well you watch him, he'll be laughing his balls off." The people not laughing are always the white people who don't know if it's all right to laugh with him.

M: So you never tone your material down?

JM: Well, I've had people say, "Listen, Jackie, I'm here with my son and he's in a wheelchair, would you please do a bunch of wheelchair jokes?" And I'd say to them, "I would love to, and I know your son would get a kick out of it, but it's not fair to the people sitting next to him--because they'll be so uptight." It's like a midget. If a midget's in the crowd and you do midget jokes, the midget goes nuts! But the people next to them are like, "Jackie must be very insensitive, blah blah blah." That's where the discomfort lands.

M: Are there comedians whose work you admire these days?

JM: I don't follow comedy at all, all comedians are pretty much the same. Also, if you watch a comic and he's better than you, you feel like shit. And if you watch a comic and he sucks, you're wasting your time. So it's kinda weird. But I loved Sam [Kinison], Dice used to make me laugh. I love the Marx Brothers.

M: Anyone whose work you really don't like?

JM: I'm not a big fan of "motherfucker-motherfucker-allyounigggers-motherfucker," just 'cuz I don't see the comedy in that. I mean, I'll laugh my balls off at Chris Rock, there's nobody funnier than him. But there's nothing less funny than a guy who says fuck 12 times in a 10-word sentence.

M: Any jokes that you deem too extreme?

JM: Nah... although I did recently hear somewhat of a new twist on a really disgusting old joke. It's a braggart's joke, a shit-eating joke [tells long joke about a guy who eats shit for money, but when a big bet is laid, won't eat the shit because there is a hair in it]. HAHAHAHA..... so stupid.... shit jokes and pussy jokes, y'know. I was gonna put an even dirtier joke on my new CD. It's another long joke about three hookers squatting over a glass table...

M: How long do you see yourself working on the Howard Stern Show?

JM: Well, we're all coming to contract negotiations on December 31 and nobody even knows if Howard himself is gonna sign back up. So everything's up in the air for everybody. It'll be interesting.

At the Really Late Show at Club Soda, Friday July 21, midnight, $20