Joel Stein’s hilarious Time magazine column this week is titled “Life After Oprah: She says she’s hanging it up in 2006. Why men are counting the days.” Read it before they archive it.
“… men are frustrated that we don’t have our own Oprah. Ours are all embarrassing flameouts like Robert Bly, or the Promise Keepers, or Al Gore the week that Naomi Wolf made him wear flannel. The best we have right now are Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel of The Man Show, and those guys wouldn’t even be able to fill out their live audience if they didn’t liberally sprinkle the studio with pole dancers.
I don’t know Stein but I used the Time mag feedback form on their web site to email him kudos for his irreverent, intelligent, and funny writing, which is often about guys. I told him that my usual tag line for Real Joe is “Important stuff. Plain talk. Ordinary guys” but when people want to know what the hell that means, I usually say “It’s an irreverent Oprah for guys.” Then they usually get it.