They weren’t just interviews, they were “terrorizations” – wacky and weird, but carried off with a straight face and charm. It’s no wonder people loved to be quizzed by Mal Sharpe and Jim Coyle.

By Jessica Nemire & Tessa Murphy

Imagine earning a living in San Francisco radio broadcasting by lying to unsuspecting passersby and tape-recording it. That’s how Bay Area radio-TV personality, dark humorist and renowned jazz trombonist Mal Sharpe crashed into the eclectic media scene a half-century ago.

Sharpe’s Sunday night radio show Back On Basin Street, KCSM, was a Bay Area classic for 15 years until it blew its final note in 2012. His Dixieland band, ironically named, the Big Money in Jazz Band, plays weekend gigs at bars and restaurants throughout San Francisco and Marin.

Born Malcolm Sharpe in Boston, 1936, he traveled west in 1959 after graduating college to check out the beatnik scene before he was to be inducted into military service. Living in a boarding house in downtown San Francisco, Sharpe encountered a fellow resident, Jim Coyle, at the dinner table.

“Coyle looked about 27,” said Sharpe in a 2014 interview at San Francisco State University. “He was telling these girls he was 100 years old and was taking part in an experiment where they hooked him up to a solar thing. These girls were eating it up.”

So was Sharpe. “I thought it was pretty wacky.”

Sharpe found Coyle to be a “compulsive prankster” who was “similar to Borat” – comedian and film star Sasha Baron Cohen who clandestinely embarrasses people on camera by posing as a confused character new to American culture.

Sharpe and Coyle, just for fun, began to wander around San Francisco telling elaborate tales to random people and tape recording their reactions.

The fun was interrupted when Sharpe returned to the East Coast for a two-year stint writing Army training films. The two later reunited in San Francisco.

“We would meet in the morning in a coffee shop in North Beach, and we would see a sign that said ‘mice’ or something and that would trigger a whole thing,” Sharpe said. “For example, we might walk around telling people that [Coyle] was ‘Mr. Mouse’ and mice were named after him.”

After two years of fooling people in San Francisco, sometimes conducting and recording 12 to 18 “interviews” a day, the pair was hired by Jim Dunbar at KGO Radio in 1964 to professionally continue their shtick with a nightly radio show called Coyle and Sharpe on the Loose.

Sharpe would introduce himself as the radio producer and Coyle as whomever he was playing that day. The pair found they had a mutually “sick” sense of humor.

Pioneers in ambush approach – “Terrorizations,” as they then called them – Coyle and Sharpe defined in-your-face radio and TV now common with broadcasts like such as the Howard Stern Show, Da Ali G. (Cohen) Show, Cash Cab and others.

The pair used their innocently straight faces and unexpected charm to make perfect strangers believe the fantastic: bioengineered herds of apples with human feet migrate through California; a zebra-eel hybrid exists that can guard your business at night; a man on the street is opening a new tourist attraction that involves one man existing in a living hell – complete with flames and giant bats.

The comedians cited fake scientific studies and respectable jobs to seem reliable, and slowly prodded people into believing in a preposterous situation. Despite the cruel-seeming nature of their act, Sharpe viewed their targets as partners, rather than victims. People occasionally would recognize their bit from the radio but, more often that not, the joke would continue for several minutes before the daring duo admitted it was a prank.

“People [they fooled] had a good time,” Sharpe said. “It was almost like being in a collaboration with them. We were all in it together.”

Prior to meeting Coyle, Sharpe described himself as a “pretty conventional guy.” He said, “I had a sense of humor but I wasn’t a comedian. I had no vision of myself being on the radio as a humorist.”

Coyle did most of the talking in their stunts. Sharpe said he only started pranking people with Coyle because Coyle needed someone to turn on his tape recorder. “He couldn’t even start his car,” Sharpe laughed.

In the beginning, neither of them imagined that pranking people on the street would lead to a full-time job. After being with KGO for a while, the duo was moderately well-known around San Francisco. “We just kept the prank going until something happened,” Sharpe said. “It changed my life.”

Sharpe described Coyle as a charming man, allegedly having talked his way into 216 jobs by age 26. The most impressive position, if true, was at Trans World Airlines as a copilot, a position for which he had never trained.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine in 1964, Sharpe said, “We try to pose an almost plausible question, then proceed step by step into absurdity until the interviewee is seething.”

Coyle and Sharpe also recorded a hidden camera television pilot in 1964 called The Imposters with host George Fenneman – San Francisco State grad and former sidekick to Groucho Marx on his 1950s TV show. The project remained unsold and was never aired in full.

Coyle and Sharpe also recorded two albums for Warner Bros., The Absurd Impostors and The Insane Minds of Coyle and Sharpe. Though the pair worked well together, Coyle was apparently suspicious of other people involved in their act. This became a problem during the pair’s short stint with Warner Bros. and Coyle eventually disappeared.

Sharpe continued pranking people on-air after he and Coyle stopped working together in 1967. The pair, according to Sharpe, was “much crueler” than Sharpe was on his own.

Sharpe continued as a solo interviewer with a 1971 syndicated TV series, The Street People. A decade later, he hosted a series of PBS specials called Mal Sharpe’s San Francisco – a mix of new skits and older clips.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, which focuses on the 20th- and 21st-century, featured a centennial exhibit in 2000 titled “The American Century.” The works of Sharpe and Coyle were featured in its Soundworks Exhibit.

Today, Sharpe has edited and compiled a new three-CD & DVD set, Coyle & Sharpe: These 2 Men Are Impostors, featuring recordings and unseen TV footage. Their hidden-camera TV pilot, The Impostors, is contained on this release.

He continues to do commercials and voice-overs and his band is promoting its new CD, Tin Roof Blues. He and his wife, Sandra, live in Berkeley.

Sharpe received a call one day from The San Francisco Chronicle after not speaking to Coyle for 17 years. The reporter asked for info to use in Coyle’s obituary. Sharpe had heard Coyle had died from diabetes but told The Chronicle that Coyle died in a cave-in while tunneling in Barcelona. This is still reported as fact on some online sites.

Smiling, Sharpe said, “He would have wanted me to tell them something like that.”

♦

Jessica Nemire and Tessa Murphy are senior Journalism students at San Francisco State University. Nemire is minoring in Critical Social Thought and aspires to write and travel. Murphy is moving to Europe in autumn, 2014.