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Limbaugh and Stern were both born on Jan. 12, Limbaugh in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Stern on Long Island, New York. Limbaugh's father owned a piece of a local radio station where Rush III got his start, and Stern's father was a Manhattan radio engineer. Limbaugh tried strenuously to please his father, | and, according to his brother David, "echoes of my dad reverberate through everything my brother says." Stern says his father continually screamed that he was a "moron." Neither dated much in high school. Both work very conscientiously and don't like vacations or pursue hobbies or very active social lives. (Limbaugh is friendly with baseball's George Brett, as well as the Mosbachers and Matalin; Stern says he pals around with literally no one, ever.) Both are shy and charming in real life. On the air (both work in midtown Manhattan), Limbaugh half-jokingly boasts he is "the epitome of morality and virtue" with "talent on loan from God," and Stern half- jokingly calls himself "King of all Media." Both are Snapple spokesmen.
Both complain about being misrepresented. And Limbaugh does not officially consider all feminists "feminazis," only those who are enthusiastic about abortion. Both sometimes make ugly cracks about blacks, and both could be considered pigs, happily unenlightened. "I love the women's movement," Limbaugh has written, "especially when I'm walking behind it." Both interlard their radio talk with bits of hard rock. Each believes, with some justice, that he is being made a special target by the Federal Government. Limbaugh says he feels persecuted by Democratic Congressmen who want to re- establish broadcasting's Fairness Doctrine in order to pressure TV and radio stations to cancel his shows. And the FCC is going after Stern vigorously, during the past year fining Stern's employer $1.1 million for using words no dirtier than "rump" and "wiener" and "love lava."
Stern is at heart a deeply perverse jester, and looks and sounds like one. When he chased Phil Donahue in order to kiss him (to Phil's extreme displeasure) on Donahue's show two weeks ago, he was being the pedal-to-the- metal performance artist one expects. And his unedited riffing can often be, as charged, disgusting: his jokes 11 years ago about his wife's miscarriage were inexcusable, his now defunct TV show's low-rent T&A spectacle a depressing glimpse into a New Jersey heart of darkness.
Limbaugh the humorist, on the other hand, is a curious new species. "The political turf of parody and satirists has almost always been left," Jeff Greenfield says. "It's one thing to attack liberals. But to be laughing at them -- that's when some people get crazy." Limbaugh calls the grandly elegant Secretary of the Treasury "Lord Bentsen." He calls the presidential counselor David Rodham Gergen.