Back in the 1990s sometime, I walked into a record store with some friends. The store was Hyde and Zeke Records in Gainesville, Florida, and as they normally did, they had a record playing on their turntable. The record was simply titled Great Phone Calls. This wasn't a music record, but an album of crank calls someone made, and it was hilarious.

   The most popular crank callers of that era were the Jerky Boys. Their stuff was funny, some of it even hilarious, but at the same time it was rather silly. Great Phone Calls took crank call albums to a whole new level. Instead of a circus full of crazy characters, this record keeps it simple. The characters making the calls are not cartoonish like the Jerky Boys, instead you have a guy who really wants to join your band or a guy who needs a pizza made according to his very specific dietary restrictions. The humor is more confrontational than absurd.

   The creator is not credited on the album, at least not on the original edition, but it has since been revealed to be Gregg Turkington. Gregg is also the man behind comedian Neil Hamburger, a character we find an early version of on this album. Turkington not only gives us an entertaining album of crank calls, this album also serves as a guide to what makes a good crank call. So for reasons not even completely known to myself, I shall now examine each of the phone calls on this album, one by one, and see what makes them great...