He was born to be jerky.
The founder of prank-call comedy legends The Jerky Boys credited his own mom and dad for inspiring his insane characters – and now he’s ready to take his career full circle.
Johnny Brennan is planning to head back to the big screen 30 years after the release of “The Jerky Boys: The Movie,” this time playing his father Tony in a biopic tentatively titled “Don’t Hang Up” about his uncanny rise from New York wiseass to a wisecracking pop culture phenomenon in the 1990s.
“If you spoke to my father, it was just a normal guy just speaking like I’m speaking to you now,” he told The Post in a recent interview, the day after he received the script.
“But when my dad got pissed off that’s when Frank Rizzo came out,” he said, then flipped the switch into the familiar voice of his foul-mouthed, short-tempered alter ego. “And things [came out] like, ‘Hey get over here, you f–king rubberneck f–k.’ But he would only speak that way when he was pissed off or when it was time for one of us to get a f–king asswhooping.”
Chronically nervous Sol Rosenberg was just a riff on his mother, Gloria, while other characters were based on uncles or others he came across growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, he said. His characters had New York accents and used phrases he heard growing up like “sizzlechest” while sprinkling in new quotes of his own like “skid plate.”
His father and mother — who died in 2000 and 2017, respectively — didn’t mind the notoriety, Brennan said, even when a Maxim magazine reporter laughed in his mother’s face when she spoke and Rosenberg’s voice came out.
Brennan, who’s now 63, told his mother it was all “pretty extraordinary.”
“Just by me copying your voice and knowing that you were f–king hysterical, you know we were able to touch the world with these characters I’ve created, based on the family,” he said.
Long before Brennan went to the top of the Billboard album charts with his former partner-in-pranking Kamal Ahmed, he said he was already causing trouble in a big Irish family and a household that he describes as “nutty as a nuthouse.”
He was the oldest of five rowdy siblings and a class clown at Mater Christi school in Astoria before his family packed up and moved upstate to a ranch house in Salisbury Hills in the 1970s.
He started recording himself and he remembers his dad once walking in on him while he taped a twisted audio skit on his reel-to-reel about his elderly neighbor getting run over by a lawnmower – screams and all.
“I say, ‘Dad I’m just making some s–t. I’m making some tapes and whatnot,” he said, before unleashing the Frank Rizzo voice again. “He goes, ‘Jesus Christ, boy, you’re a f–king nut.’ And then he would go out and shut the door.”
By the late 1980s, the home-recorded prank calls had spread through bootleg copies of cassette tapes from his brothers to their friends – then across the country. The off-the-wall tapes had unsuspecting “victims” on the other end trying to make sense of bizarre scenarios, including a call where Brennan-as-Rizzo tries to buy balloons to float his child around a party “like a pinata” – though he worries the kid might float away into the sky.
The viral-before- viral comedy act was so massive that the pair hit the big screen in 1995, with a plot that involved Rizzo calling the Mafia and a cast that included Oscar-winner Alan Arkin.
The movie wasn’t a critical or commercial success, which Brennan partly blames on a massive snowstorm that hit the northeast the weekend it premiered – but fans have stuck with it over the years, he said.
“We had a great f–king time with that film and I think we have more of a following for that Jerky Boys movie now than ever before,” Brennan said.
Brennan downplayed any rift or hard feelings between him and Ahmed, despite reports in Rolling Stone and elsewhere of bad blood when he left the act in the late 1990s to pursue filmmaking. But Brennan admitted the whole game had changed when he set solo out in recent years.
“The people are not the same. First of all, nobody picks up the phone anymore… and if they do pick up the call, they’re waiting to be pranked or ‘is this some reality show,’” he said. “This time I had to literally do anywhere from five to 20 calls to get a call on a subject I was going to use.”
But the calls really just a vehicle to get his characters out into the world, he said. New vehicles include his popular Cameo page, the planned biopic – written by Billy Narducci and produced by Wolfden films –and even a Seth McFarlane-produced documentary on The Jerky Boys, he said.
He’s honored that after 40 years later, fans still come up to him with bizarre requests.
“‘‘Hey Johnny if I call my brother can you tell him you’re gonna wrap his head in with a f–king ratchet?’” he said, quoting one of his character’s infamous threats.
Fans sometimes apologize for bothering him with the weird requests, but he said he never gets jerky with them.
“‘What do you feel bad about?,” he said. “I created something that the people f–king love, they love that s–t, they loved it for decades.”
