In Defense of Bad Taste: It’s a Relief in Grim Times : Humor: Howard Stern is popular because he knows just where to cross the line of propriety, and that’s an art.

Want to complain about shock jock Howard Stern? Take a number. Since Stern is an equal opportunity offender, legions of women, blacks and gays are steamed about the pronouncements of the self-crowned “King of All Media.” So is the Federal Communications Commission, which last month slapped Los Angeles’ KSLX-FM with a $105,000 fine for a 12-day run of particularly raunchy Stern broadcasts.

Despite the controversy, the Stern steamroller shows no sign of slowing up. Stern is now No. 1 in Los Angeles and New York and is making waves in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland.

You might ask why I, a card-carrying feminist, a person who cheerfully adheres to the politically correct dictates of race, gender and sexual orientation, give a hoot about Stern’s fate. I could give you the high-minded answer, which is that I am deeply offended by the government telling me what to listen to on the radio. But the simple truth is that I think Stern is funny.

Howard Stern is our collective high-frequency id. He has an unerring sense of where the line of propriety is and boldly strolls across it. He’s the class clown whom the teacher secretly likes, even as she sends him to the principal’s office.

In Washington, where I started listening to Stern in 1981, he shocked the citizenry by making jokes after an Air Florida plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge, killing 74 passengers. How much was a ticket from the airport to the bridge, Stern demanded of an Air Florida reservations clerk.

Despite his increasing fame, Stern hasn’t grown any less outrageous. During the recent MTV Awards, he soared across a Los Angeles auditorium like Peter Pan, held up by invisible wires, wearing a superhero costume. “I am Fartman,” he intoned gravely, while clouds of smoke billowed and flatulent noises filled the hall. Then he turned his back to the audience, revealing his bare 38-year-old derriere.

Stern’s show is an oddball melange of his outlandish opinions, news snippets and quirky guests such as Jessica Hahn, second-tier sitcom stars, Penthouse Pets and drunk rock ‘n’ rollers. Between stunts like Lesbian Dial-a-Date and Guess Who’s the Jew, Stern shamelessly hawks his video, “Howard Stern’s Butt Bongo Fiesta.”

While Stern spends much of the show urging female guests to take off their clothes, his libidinous posturing is basically a ruse. Listen between the lines: Stern is a happily married suburban man with two children and a third on the way.

His audience has expanded beyond the young listeners who took his locker-room humor at face value. Still, being a Sternophile is no easy matter. When I commended the Stern show to my fellow journalist Steve, who as a white male in his 30s is a more likely demographic candidate for Stern fandom than I, he called Stern “the most childishly narcissistic and pointless individual I’ve ever heard.” That’s mild compared to the views of the various special-interest groups who are trying to hound Stern & Co. off the air.

But Stern’s attitudes about race and sex are far more complex than his humor would superficially suggest. Stern’s longtime sidekick, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, and he treats her with respect and affection, as well he should, since she is key to his success. As the silky-toned voice of reason, she pulls him back from the precipice regularly; as a multi-cultural one-woman laugh track, she acquits him of charges of sexism and racism.

In these days of heightened sensitivities, it’s a relief for many of us to hear someone who blithely ignores the rules. What others say behind closed doors, Stern mellifluously brays on the air. Stern doesn’t turn people into bigots; what you bring to the show is what you get. Admittedly, some of it is embarrassing, offensive and distasteful. But inevitably, there’s the shock of recognition.

Does Stern ever go too far? Obviously. When Stern learned that the chairman of the FCC was being treated for prostate cancer, he quipped, “I pray for his death.”

But the missteps are inevitable in a show that pushes the limits of what’s acceptable. “The error that a lot of people make is that humor should be nice,” says Dr. Harvey Mindess, a psychologist at Antioch University in Los Angeles. “Humor is the renegade factor in human nature. It’s a natural instinct in people to achieve release, whenever one feels constricted or uncomfortable. Humor is, if you will, a fart.”

Long live Fartman!