Opie & Anthony Get the Last Laugh

Opie (Greg Hughes), left, and Anthony Cumia, exiled from CBS Radio after their sex-in-St.-Patrick's stunt, have returned to the fold and still have their XM show. (By Tamara Beckwith -- Associated Press)

When last heard on Washington's airwaves, radio personalities Opie & Anthony were presiding over perhaps the most vulgar stunt ever broadcast: a live account of a Northern Virginia couple allegedly having sex in the vestibule of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. A tidal wave of outrage followed, and within a week Opie (Greg Hughes) and Anthony (Anthony Cumia) were gone, fired from their nationally syndicated program.

Today, almost four years later, the duo reaches a milestone in their unusual comeback story. The New York-based jocks return to a regular weekday gig on WJFK-FM (106.7), one of the stations they were yanked from and the 11th to restore them since April.

In fact, after a two-year exile following St. Patrick's-gate, O&A have reemerged as perhaps the important players at the company that fired them, CBS Radio. All the stations that have put them back on the air, including WJFK, are owned by CBS.

For this, Hughes, 41, and Cumia, 43, can thank Howard Stern. The company went back to them in desperation after Stern left CBS for satellite radio in January and after his initial replacements -- particularly former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth in New York -- flopped miserably.

Which means that Opie & Anthony have gone from pariahs to has-beens to would-be saviors of one of the radio industry's largest companies.

The normally brash pair aren't gloating about CBS's change of heart. Nor do they sound particularly bitter -- at least now -- about their removal from the air in August 2002.

"I wish [the company] had hung in there and rode out the controversy," says Hughes by phone from New York. "I mean, [the church stunt] was in bad taste and all that. We get that. But the attention we received would have translated into huge, huge ratings if they had stuck with us."

Besides, to this day, he maintains the broadcast was defensible: "I know we did an FCC-friendly show. Nothing graphic was ever described. It was very tame on the air. But it was a different time. We put the FCC in a bad position."

Adds Cumia, "There were times when we thought: Are we ever going to get another chance? Are we going to get blackballed? The radio experts said we were done, that we wouldn't be able to work on a 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno."

The exile years weren't all bad. CBS Radio was obligated to pay them for the two years remaining on their contract. Since the contract prevented them from working elsewhere, that essentially meant a very long vacation. The two men spent time with their families, visited friends, went to the beach, worked out and kept in near-daily contact with each other. For a time, Hughes says, he "wandered around the country," prompting Cumia to describe him as "like Caine from 'Kung Fu.' "

Satellite radio played a twin role in their return. Not only did Stern's departure to the Sirius service work in their favor, but Sirius's archrival -- Washington-based XM Satellite Radio -- was the first to hire them back when their CBS contract lapsed in late 2004.

They've been on XM since then. In an unusual twist, "The Opie & Anthony Show" will continue on XM in the morning even as the program returns to CBS stations. That makes O&A the only personalities heard on both satellite and conventional terrestrial radio simultaneously. Their XM show is simulcast on most of the CBS stations from 6 to 9 a.m. (WJFK will run it, tape-delayed, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.). At 9 a.m., they continue for another two hours exclusively on XM.

The simulcast's appeal for XM is that Opie & Anthony are free to mention their satellite show while they're on the CBS stations, giving XM a huge publicity windfall daily, says Eric Logan, XM's executive vice president of programming. What's more, CBS is paying XM to carry the program and has agreed to let XM run ads on its stations, something many conventional radio stations do not permit.

Hughes and Cumia say they've evolved since the 2002 stunt. Although they still engage in some naughty talk (bleeped on the FCC-monitored terrestrial broadcasts but permissible on unregulated satellite), they reject being labeled as "shock jocks." Hughes says they'd like to be known simply as comedians.

"There really isn't all that much shock left out there," he says. "The Internet gives people all the shocking sex and violence they could ever want. We have to be entertaining. We have to provide something you can relate to. That's where the show has changed."

"We've kind of matured," Cumia chimes in. Then, perhaps realizing that "mature" isn't exactly what their predominantly male audience is looking for, he adds: "We're still edgy and crazy as ever, just more mature. We don't feel like getting fired again."

Judging by the absence of controversy since they returned in late April, they seem to be behaving. They have even received support from the Catholic League, a New York-based organization that was instrumental in lobbying CBS for their removal four years ago. The group's president, Bill Donohue, issued a statement in April saying, "The Catholic League hopes Opie and Anthony have a great run."

So does Michael Hughes, the executive who oversees WJFK. The Fairfax station has fared relatively better than its counterparts across the country in replacing Stern -- "The Junkies" program remains its morning drive-time anchor -- but it still has suffered. So Hughes (no relation to Greg Hughes) is moving aside a homegrown talk show hosted by Peter Rosenberg for the syndicated Opie & Anthony.

"They fit right in with what we're doing," Hughes says. "The decision to bring them back was an easy one."