Everyone’s tried doing Howard Cosell at one time or another. Imitating his unique Brooklyn staccato, that is.
When Cosell was ruling the roost on Monday Night Football [if you’re that old enough to remember] along with Dandy Don Meredith and Frank Gifford, there wasn’t a better team in sports casting. Or maybe broadcasting for that matter.
People who weren’t even into professional football would stay up just to listen to Cosell with his NY Times crossword puzzle vocabulary banter with “Danderoo” or describe the Miami Dolphins’ Nick Buoniconti as a man of infinite perspicacity.
Other occasions were when Cosell would surely put his foot in his mouth. Like the time when he blurted out, “Look at that little monkey run.”
Cosell was describing a pass caught by an African American ballplayer named Alvin Garrett, a receiver for The Washington Redskins, and, obviously, Cosell in his exuberance got a little too carried away with the moment.
As you might imagine, Cosell had to soft shoe the episode the next day with comments about that being meant as a term of endearment.
But Cosell at his best was when he got blottoed [allegedly] and the time he barfed in the announcer’s booth during a broadcast from Philadelphia. [ABC had to come up with a cover story that he had the flu.]
The embarrassing faux pas was later chronicled in a mainstream flick called Monday Night Mayhem with actor John Turturro. Turturro was alright as Cosell, but not nearly in the same league as the guy Will Ryder comes up with to play him in a porn parody of Monday Night Football.
A bit heavier in the jawline than the real Howard, maybe, but otherwise Rick Madrid is flawless. As is the entire project including graphics that will have you thinking you’re watching a real Monday Night telecast.
Will Ryder is the inspired re-inventor of the wheel. So while it’s no big secret that porn made a living out of mainstream parody back in the Eighties and early Nineties it was rarely as good as what Ryder is coming up with now. Funny scripts, good sex, and dead-on casting is the business model Ryder adheres to religiously.
As the best visual proof is a situation when the “real” Bill Cosby pays a visit to Howard and broadcast partner John Madden [Billy Goodrich] during the first game of the season pitting the Green Bay Packers against the Chicago Bears.
The fact that Ryder’s from Milwaukee is the inside joke, but when comic Thomas Ward begins mugging just like The Coz you’re dropping dead in your shorts.
By some strange roll of the genetic dice, Ward looks enough like Cosby to fool the family. Not like Cosby, but exactly like Cosby. Thus begins some funny self-congratulatory commercial plugs, Ward as Coz disavowing the porn shoot Ryder did spoofing him. Then when some crazed mama in haircurlers finds her way into the booth attacking Ward, Madden’s busy diagramming a play on the screen describing how security’s going to take her out football-style. Bam! Yeah, Goodrich pretty much has Madden down to the cliché but in a way I feel sorry for him lining up against the likes of Madrid and Ward.
Lee Bang plays OJ in another cute bit that has a flummoxed fortune teller choking on her crystal ball rather than reveal his future.
Now comes the good part of this Hustler-distributed opus: the girls. The casting is primo with tons of beautiful young ass and Ryder gets a number of fiveways going, turning locker room interviews with refs, and fan tailgate parties into mini-orgies.
Angelina Armani is particularly luscious as the girlfriend of football great “Say It Ain’t So” Manhattan Joe [Evan Stone]. She wants her taste of fame and asks Joe what she’s got to do to get it.
“Blow me,” he tells her. Sometimes it’s as easy as that.