I’m going to hit the boilerplate information at the top. Then I can venture into the complex, funny and curious mind of John Curley.

Curley has worked alongside Shari Elliker on KIRO since January 2021. He had been paired with Tom Tangney on The Tom & Curley Show, which debuted in 2014. Tangney had been at KIRO for nearly 30 years. Before that, he was an Emmy Award-winning TV host. 

Curley explained Tangney’s departure this way.

“Tom’s mother was 94 while she struggled through the pandemic,” Curley said. 

“He’s in his mid-60s, and I think he essentially understood life is ephemeral, and he had other things to experience. Perhaps he felt the job wasn’t as much fun as it once had been.”

Curley described his former partner as a polar opposite when it came to politics. 

“You could hit your brother on the head with a telephone,” Curley said. “Then, a short while later, you’d be playing Nerf football in the yard because there was nobody else to play with. That’s the way it was.”

You just buried differences you were bound to have that day and moved on.

“Patch it up quick,” Curley explained. Tom and I had that brother relationship. We’d go at it on the air, and after a commercial break, we’d be fine again.”

Politics was a contentious issue between the duo, but Curley said on the radio today that the Left vs. Right thing doesn’t work anymore.

“The audience feels the tension.”

The pandemic affected Curley’s life hard and forced him to redefine his priorities. “I lost half a million dollars,” Curley said. “My auction business cratered.” Still, John Curley Auction Entertainment is doing quite well, thank you. The man could sell hair extensions to Donald Trump. Maybe even dreadlocks.

One afternoon on the air, Tom Tangney pissed Curley off something fierce. So Curley set down his headset and went outside in the middle of the show. Broadcasting from his cabin, he figured he had some chores to do anyway.

“I didn’t want to scream at him, so I hopped on my tractor and took care of a few things,” Curley said. 

You might ask how that went over. 

“I know a big fan who listens to our show a lot. She said it was 20 minutes of intense radio. She thought Tom was going to have a heart attack, wondering where I had gone. But he is one of the most good-natured human beings I’ve known. Nothing phases him. He’d laugh at negative text messages sent his way and never took anything personally.”

Sounds like a eulogy, but Tom Tangney is alive and well.  

Curley never looks at his messages at work. 

“The IT guy would call me and ask me to delete 87,000 unread emails. I guess I was clogging the system.”

Curley is an impossibly funny, and it turns out, extemporaneous guy. He can really think on his feet. A woman in the office, Stephanie, asked Curley if he could come back and take a look at a video. The guy in the video was drunk as a skunk, holding a mop and fixing to smash in a window on a truck. 

“Stephanie asked me to do a voice-over, kind of like a baseball play-by-play description of what the guy was doing.”

Curley did. And it was hilarious. 

“The man fixes his stance and starts reigning blows on the window with the mop handle. That’s 14 attempts if you’re counting at home.” That’s just a snippet. The man goes on to climbing on the roof and quickly falling off the relatively short roof. Somebody get some salami and cream cheese and rub it in this guy’s face. He’s down.” 

We laugh at an idiot’s expense, but he deserved it.

As the kids say, the video was picked up and went ‘viral.’

Curley is a little odd. And I mean that in the most fantastic way.

He lives in a 300-square-foot cabin with no indoor toilet. But that’s not the odd part.

“I never watched The Godfather until recently when I was flying back from Paris,” Curley said.

“I remember reading about Marlon Brando and how he worked the scene. The cat with him wasn’t even supposed to be in the scene. Somehow the cat was on the set and tried to get off. He jumped into Brando’s lap before the take when he’s in his office for his daughter’s wedding. Here is Brando, just petting the cat. It’s biting at his hand, all while this guy is asking for a favor. When Don Corleone comes to a decision, he sets the cat on the desk, and it disappears. It just all organically developed.”

Yup. That’s a taste of what it’s like talking to John Curley. 

He’s tight with his brother Chuck, always has been. They made a pact when they were kids. 

“We were having breakfast and reading the ‘commercials’ on the side of the cereal boxes. On one box was an ad for the movie Star Wars, which had just come out. We vowed to never see the movie. A sacred pact.”

They never did. To compound matters, Curley said he interviewed George Lucas on a junket a while back, and Lucas asked him what he thought of the latest installment of the series. 

“I told him I never saw any of them,” Curley said, once again, no trace of embarrassment. “I can still see his face.”

You had to figure if there was no indoor toilet in his cabin; a television was not part of the scene either.

He’s never seen Cheers, Titanic or ET. So Curley gets a pass on those. None are what I would refer to as required viewing. Besides, there was still room on the door for Jack. 

If he were ignorant of movies and television, you’d assume the guy read books all his life. You’d be wrong. But he did catch up. 

“I read magazines or newspapers to be current, but I had never spent time reading books. I’d never read Dickens, Slaughterhouse Five, Great Expectations.”

Yup, no embarrassment. 

“I knew I had a lot of catching up to do. I also knew television was like heroin. I can’t believe how many times I’ve heard about people sitting at home and binging a series. I’d just feel empty. I’d never do it.”

His father subscribed to one of those book series where if you purchased Little Women, you’d get The Great Gatsby for free!  “Collect all l00 of our classic books,” and get a free bowl of soup. 

“I plowed through them all,” Curley said. 

“I do see why it’s important to read classics. Not just going through the motions, but what you can really take away from them. I don’t feel any smarter. A great sense of satisfaction. Now I see that reading is important, and I’m not just going through the motions.” 

When his father passed away, he and his brother Chuck couldn’t help themselves from goofing around–even at the funeral. 

“Each of us were on opposite sides of the grave,” Curley said. “Chuck was lifting up his leg as if he was going to climb in. I did the same. What we realized and what we were saying is, we recognized we were the next ones in a grave. One of us was going to be first. We wondered how many more summers each of us had left.”

His mother left him some money when she passed, as well as 10 acres of land. Curley said he sees all sorts of snakes, cougars, bears, and bobcats. 

“I know a guy named Larry who tracked a cougar who had jumped over some fences,” Curley explained. “He tracked it down and killed it.”

A couple of weeks later, Larry invited Curley over to dinner. While he was enjoying his meal, Larry’s wife Dana asked Curley how he was enjoying the cougar meat.

Amazingly, Curley didn’t drop his fork and stop eating. He wasn’t repulsed. 

“It’s just a cat,” he said. “I’ve only got a couple more bites, just let me finish.”

Just as he lives off the radar, Curley said he doesn’t have a lot of friends. 

“People assume if you’re on radio and TV, you hang out with all sorts of people. I don’t. My mother told me she was going to throw a surprise party for me on my 26th birthday. She said she couldn’t do it because she couldn’t think of any of my friends.”

I’m pretty sure he loves his brother Chuck, even if Curley didn’t say it. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. Chuck is a lawyer and enjoys a fine life. Still, Chuck is very intrigued by the way his brother’s life turned out. 

Chuck told his brother that he’d followed all the rules in life. He said he completed all the assignments on time, worked the extra credit problems, went to law school, graduated top of his class, had a rainy day fund, changed the oil in the car before he was required to, changed batteries in his home fire alarms regularly. Chuck played life by the numbers.

‘You’re further along than I am,’ Chuck told his brother. ‘You don’t play by any of the rules. You have nice clothes. You’re successful.’ It’s not that it bothered his brother. Instead, he was just amazed at how far his brother had gone coloring outside the lines. 

“We talk all the time,” Curley said. “He’ll call when he’s driving into the office.”

The magic still happens when Curley visits his brother at Christmas. 

“I’ll sneak up behind him and start pounding on his back for no reason.”

When they were younger, one of them would just start doing jumping jacks out of nowhere.

“My brother would be watching TV, and I’d start doing jumping jacks. That was really a warning. It symbolized that ‘Grand Dad had something to say.’ That meant I was about to drag him to the carpet, put him in a wrestling move, and fart in his face.”

When they get together today, if one starts doing jumping jacks, it’s a clear signal for the other to start running. 

A Billy Bob Thornton Story.

Curley interviewed actor, director, and writer Billy Bob Thornton on a press junket. He said you sit a lot closer to your interview subject than you’d think. Almost knee to knee. 

“You sit around with the star and wait for them to adjust the lights,” Curley said. “Billy Bob, like most of them, was polite. But they’ve been answering the same questions for hours. You can understand how this could be hard for them.”

They were at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, asking each other which way they were going to sit for the interview.

“I’d never seen that switchblade thing,” Curley said without embarrassment. He meant to say Sling Blade. “We were just waiting, and I told him I figured he was sent a lot of scripts.”

Billy Bob politely smiled and nodded. 

“I’ve got a great movie idea,” Curley told Thornton. Keep in mind, Curley is a guy who hasn’t really seen a lot of movies. It figures he’d have an idea for one.

“I could tell Billy Bob was thrilled,” Curley said sarcastically. “I told him it was a true story, and he said, ‘Let me hear it.’”

Curley did. It’s a rather long and convoluted story, but the critical component is that Billy Bob listened to Curley’s pitch. 

‘Hollywood would have ruined your story,’ Billy Bob told Curley. Curley asked Billy Bob what he would do with the story.

It’s not essential here what Billy Bob told him, just because Curley had the brass balls to pitch a goofy story to an accomplished Hollywood guy like Thornton.

Curley presumably got his dry wit and humor from his father, Jack Curley. He kept his father’s last voicemail before he died. 

“He told me he’d just come from the doctor,” Curley said. “It’s cancer, he told me. The fast kind.”

The senior Curley told his son if he didn’t have any plans on Sunday, he should come out to see him and say goodbye.

“I got to the house and saw my father,” Curley said. “I asked him how he was feeling.”

‘Anxious,’ his father told him. 

“I said, why? You’ve been a good Catholic all your life. He told me he didn’t think there was a heaven. Statistically, he said, there was no more room in heaven. There were too many people.” 

It was time. As Curley was walking out of the room, he told his father goodbye. 

“He told me I was a good son,” Curley said. “I couldn’t believe it. My father was about to cry. I figured, god-damn, I’m going back to that old Irish guy and get an ‘I love you’ out of him before he goes. I turned at the door and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’ He just nodded at me and said, ‘I know you do.’”

In a way, this was hard for Curley. He didn’t get the ‘I love you’ he’d hoped for. His brother Chuck told him, ‘You know, in his world, him saying ‘you were a good son’ was better than an ‘I love you.’

“My father had a giant personality,” Curley said. “I once asked him what he considered a friend to be. He told me, ‘A friend is someone I can borrow five bucks from, not pay him back, and he never says anything.”

His interview with daredevil Robbie Knievel is another humdinger.

“I said to him, ‘So, you’re going to jump 150 motorcycles.”

Knieval let Curley in on a secret. Yes, he was going to jump the motorcycles, but there was much more of a show to it all. 

“He told me, I’m gonna ride out, take a couple of laps around the track as fast as I can. I’m going to sit and stare at the ramp for ten seconds. I’m going to go to the top of the ramp and sit some more like I’m thinking. I can easily jump the bikes; I’m just milking the moment. Some of my crew would come up the ramp and talk with me. I’d point to something in the distance, but of course, I was not pointing at anything. Just trying to create tension.” 

Curley said it’s just like on his radio show. When the show goes off the rails, the audience can feel it. Then Curley said, like Robbie Knievel, he’ll bring it back. 

“I know a guy, John Medina, who wrote  Brain Rules. He teaches at the University of Washington. He said the human brain can only stand a certain amount of information in so many minutes. In the middle of a lecture, he’ll come out of nowhere and ask the students, ‘What color is a giraffe’s tongue?”

What?

“He’d go around the room, and people would guess. Nobody would be right because they probably had never thought of such a thing.” He told them, “I’m going to give you a hint–a giraffe eats 80 percent of the day.”

A student raised their hand and said the color of a giraffe’s tongue is purple. Medina told the student he was right. Because the tongue is in the sunlight for so much of the day, it could get sunburned. The purple color of the tongue would, in essence, repel light and avoid sunburn. 

“All of this was to give the student’s brain a rest,” Curley said. “Medina refers to it as Brain Candy. He said he knows if you come up with some kind of trivia question during a long lecture, the thought and answer will release some dopamine, thereby satisfaction when you know the answer. The brain is now refreshed with the presence of dopamine, and they will retain the rest of the lecture.”

Then Curley gets to the interview he conducted with Woody Allen.

He told Allen his brother Chuck dated women for two or three dates. Then came a test. He would show them the VHS or DVD of the movie Annie Hall. If the date didn’t laugh at three specific points in the film, Chuck would not ask them out again. So that’s three significant laughs in three particular spots.

“I told Woody Allen my brother chose his wife because his then-date laughed at those three spots in the movie. Chuck figured these were easy laughs, and if they didn’t, that was it.”

Woody Allen was intrigued. He leaned forward and asked Curley a question. 

In a dynamite Woody Allen impression, Culey said Allen asked, ‘What scenes did your brother pick?’

Good question, Woody.

First, laugh. When Christopher Walken told Allen’s character Alvy Singer told Walken, ‘He was due back on the planet earth.’

Second laugh: When Alvy was at the dinner table with Annie’s parents and grandmother. 

Third laugh: When Alvy was in bed with his girlfriend and couldn’t put his mind at ease, wondering how Oswald was able to get three shots off from a book depository. How it made no sense.

Allen asked if his brother was married. Curley told Allen he wasn’t, that he couldn’t find anyone to laugh at those three spots in the movie. Allen replied, ‘that’s funny.’ 

“I told him, ‘no, seriously, he didn’t get married because he couldn’t find anyone to laugh at those spots.”

John Curley is probably the only person in history to cause Woody Allen to remain flabbergasted.

And I’m exhausted.