Phil at the Gate

I've always loved Phil Hendrie's radio show. His development of "guests" who are outrageous, but just believable enough to be "sold" to the unwitting has provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment. His own role as the moderator between his own creations he did the voices for and the suckers who bought into the act was pure magic. It worked because watching a con artist in action sell the most ridiculous situations to an unsuspecting public is gold.

But as original and funny as his characters are, it just doesn't translate when the entire audience is in on the joke.

What Phil failed to realize in his unsold pilot was that his characters are not as funny as his ability to sell the con. That was the problem; in his radio show the characters were actually the straight man in the situation (no matter how outrageous) and the callers were the funny ones. People laughed at the caller's reaction to an outrageous situation, not the situation.