It’s a phenomenon as old as human culture itself. Il Paradiso represented a falling-off from Il Purgatorio. Paradise Regained wasn’t quite up there with Paradise Lost. Twain’s later Tom Sawyer books don’t hold a candle to the original adventures of Tom and Huck. No classic TV fan needs to be told about the steady decline from I Love Lucy to The Lucy Show to Here’s Lucy to Life with Lucy, or about the way in which the pathbreaking All in the Family morphed into the generic Archie Bunker’s Place. 

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was an immensely entertaining radio program called The Howard Stern Show. After stints in Hartford and Detroit, the eponymous host took his derisive, often profane humor to Washington, where he acquired a co-host, Robin Quivers, and a producer, Fred Norris. From there, in 1982, the show — on which this threesome goofed with one another, asked celebrity guests nosy questions, took calls from quirky listeners (the notorious “Wack Pack”), recounted their own latest misadventures, and commented irreverently on the news of the day — relocated to New York, where, after three successful years on the afternoon shift at WNBC, they moved on to the morning slot at WXRK and soon began syndicating to radio stations across the country.

It was in 1983 that the full-time in-studio posse acquired a fourth member: Long Island comic John Coger Martling, Jr., aka Jackie “The Jokeman” Martling, who, I’m pleased to report, is the subject of an entertaining new documentary, Joke Man, directed by Ian Karr and available on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime. The Jackie years — which would last until 2001, when he quit over a salary dispute (Howard, who in 2006 became the highest-paid man in show business, with a five-year Sirius XM contract worth half a billion dollars, is notorious for not spreading the wealth around) — have been described by many as the show’s golden age. It wasn’t just a ratings juggernaut and cash cow; it was an American sociocultural phenomenon without precedent. Driving to work on any given morning in any one of a number of cities, you’d pass lone commuters in dozens, scores, hundreds of other cars, all laughing at the same time. Because their radios were all tuned to the Stern show. 

From the time he joined the show, which often clocked in at more than five hours (Stern routinely kept going past his scheduled four hours until he ran out of gas), Jackie was an active participant in the non-stop back-and-forth banter. In collaboration with Howard and Fred, he also wrote song parodies and sketches and came up with ideas for listener contests and the like. And he regularly did a bit called “Stump the Jokeman” that demonstrated his encyclopedic memory for jokes: Listeners would phone in with the setup, and he’d immediately supply the punchline. He almost never failed. 

But what nobody knew was that while he and the rest of the crew were schmoozing away for the delectation of millions of listeners, Jackie was also frequently scribbling on pieces of paper and placing them in front of Stern, making it possible for the host himself to deliver — as if he’d come up with it on his own — the perfect line for that very moment in the conversation, tailor-made to suit Howard’s voice and sensibility. In Joke Man, Jackie recalls that Howard’s sister, Ellen, once told him that she’d asked her brother, “When did you get so witty?” To which Howard, in a rare instance of honesty on the topic, replied, “It’s not me, it’s Jackie.” Podcaster Anthony Cumia recalls: “For years we all thought Howard was one of the quickest comics ever. Then we found out it was Jackie Martling, sitting there with a pen and paper like in the 1800s.” Cumia points out just how fast a comedic mind it takes to do such a thing and make it work.  

After Jackie’s departure, the “Jackie chair” was occupied for eight years by comic Artie Lange. Artie was a superb addition to the show, but he found that he simply couldn’t manage the feat of instantly coming up with funny lines, writing them down, and passing them to Howard before the moment had passed. Who but Jackie could pull off such a stunt? Although Artie’s contributions to the show were stellar, the drying up of that constant flow of notes made a difference. So did the disappearance from the show in 1995 of voice artist Billy West, who’d done hilarious imitations of such Big Apple notables as hotelier Leona Helmsley, Mayor David Dinkins, and Archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor. And in the years after Artie’s departure in 2009, the worst thing of all happened: Howard, Robin, and Fred went woke. As a result, the show slid dramatically downhill — one more example of a cultural touchstone losing its shine. 

Yes, there’s still something on Sirius XM that goes by the name of The Howard Stern Show. But like Archie’s Place and Life with Lucy, it’s a sad, toothless shadow of its earlier incarnation. The original three musketeers are still in place, but their muskets are firing blanks. They seem merely to be going through the motions: their weekly schedule has been drastically cut down, and they take more vacation time than ever. Now 69, Howard, once a fount of predawn pep, sounds tired. He also sounds like a totally different person from the Howard of yore. His fans once viewed him as an Everyman, the voice of the overworked, under-respected guy in the street; today, those fans, now ex-fans, call him “Hamptons Howie,” not just because of his mansion in Southampton (he also has a spread in Palm Beach and two multi-story Manhattan penthouses) but also because he’s now a politically correct showbiz phony who hobnobs with bubbleheaded lefty celebs — Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell — he once mercilessly mocked. (READ MORE: Without Michael Bay, Transformers Is No Longer the Anti-Marvel)

As mentioned, Stern’s first 15 years or so in New York are widely viewed as the show’s golden age. And today, the living personification of that era — the only member of the quartet who’s still recognizable to Stern veterans — is Jackie Martling. As we see in Joke Man, Jackie, now 75, hasn’t changed a bit: He’s still doing stand-up, he’s still a regular guy, and he’s still as outrageous as ever. (One observer notes that Jackie is immune to cancel culture because his act is so far over the line that the very idea of trying to shut him down seems a fool’s game.) Indeed, Jackie is the anti-Stern: While Howard spent three years holed up in, and broadcasting from, his South Shore, Long Island, manor because he was terrified of COVID (the image of him and his second wife, Beth, in palatial isolation recalls the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane’s mistress, working on a massive jigsaw puzzle at Xanadu, complains, “A person could go crazy in this dump!”), Jackie continues to live in the modest North Shore home that Howard used to call a shack and to invite pals and neighbors to lobster parties on the beach. 

Joke Man begins with highlights of Jackie’s pre-Stern career, which longtime fans remember but will enjoy hearing about again. Before climbing on board the S.S. Howard, for example, Jackie sold material to Rodney Dangerfield, including the immortal “two-bagger” joke. Then there’s Dial-a-Joke, Jackie’s telephone “jokeline” at (516) 922-WINE. (From my whole life, I remember three phone numbers. That’s one of them.) I was surprised to learn from Joke Man that Dial-a-Joke, that pre-internet relic, is still active. We even get a neat glimpse behind the scenes: Just as Joan Rivers, in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, showed off the battery of old file cabinets containing her renowned joke library, Joke Man takes us on a tour of the room in which a row of venerable tape machines, hooked up to a phone line, still, after all these years, spit out Jackie’s current selection of gags, which changes daily, to thousands of laugh-hungry callers per day.  

And let’s not forget Jackie’s “CARE packages.” Back in the day, Howard used to rib him for mailing boxes of Jokeman T-shirts, joke books, comedy albums, and other merch to all and sundry. (It’s how he first hooked up with Howard.) In Joke Man, we see that Jackie, who admits to being “a networking fool,” is still making those regular trips to the Bayville post office, laden down with Jokeland goodies. Rory Rosengarten, executive producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, notes with affectionate amusement that if Jackie “meets you in the supermarket, he gets your address, and within five days … you get a ton of stuff.” Yes, it’s networking, but it’s also “from his heart…. he wants to share with you the joy that he has. You gotta love a guy for that.” Rosengarten isn’t exaggerating: After I wrote about Howard for City Journal, Jackie mailed me an “I Stumped Jackie” T-shirt and a copy of his Disgustingly Dirty Joke Book.

Throughout Joke Man, Jackie comes off as a happy soul. Howard, swimming in his money bin, seems miserable. As one of Karr’s interviewees points out, the list of former chums whom Howard has alienated has grown longer over the years, while Jackie is still buddies with everybody he ever knew (excepting Howard and company, of course). That includes his ex-wife, Nancy Sirianni, who appears in the film, her enduring love and loyalty evident throughout. Also on hand are Billy West and Artie Lange, who’s been out of the limelight in recent years while recovering from heroin addiction and whose rare appearance here underscores the degree of his respect for the Jokeman. Other interviewees include Willie Nelson, actress Sean Young, and magician Penn Jillette, all of whom have bonded with Jackie over a shared love of jokes. Unsurprisingly, nobody from the current Howard Stern Show agreed to appear in Joke Man. And while it contains plenty of gut-busting clips of Jackie rattling off one-liners at various venues over the last four decades, there are no clips from the Stern Show, which obviously denied Karr the right to use them. (READ MORE: The Hollywoke Actors’ Strikeout)

It’s impossible not to have a smile on your face all the way through Joke Man. It’s what they call feel-good viewing. Nor do you have to be a veteran Stern listener to enjoy it. The person I watched it with, a Norwegian who was previously unaware of Jackie, described the documentary with a word you might not automatically associate with the Jokeman: “charming.” But it’s true: Jackie is charming. Unlike Howard — a misanthrope whose humor has always been fundamentally combative and who, we all finally realized, never really liked his millions of adoring fans — Jackie’s a people person who hasn’t let professional and financial downturns destroy his joie de vivre and whose humor, while invariably coarse, is essentially good-natured. Like Gilbert before it — Neil Berkeley’s 2017 tribute to the late, great Gilbert Gottfried — Joke Man is sheer delight, a thoroughly congenial look at a top-flight funnyman.