Legend:   Pranking radio DJ prompts a startling admission from the joke's intended victim.

Example:   [Flynn, 1999]

Nearly all local radio stations seem to employ at least one DJ who is out to make a name for himself by amusing his listeners with prank calls. One such DJ in Texas opened a can of worms when he called a woman live on air and informed her that her husband had been fired for "unprofessional conduct" after sleeping with a number of his junior colleagues. The woman was annoyed at first, but then found the silver lining in an otherwise very dark cloud. "Oh, well," she announced live on air to the entire state, "I suppose this means that I don't have to feel guilty about my affair with his brother."

Origins:   This legend plays upon one of our deepest anxieties, that despite how rosy everything seems in our primary relationships, those we hold dearest may be keeping terrible secrets from us. In this tale of adultery revealed, that which was being kept hidden from an unsuspecting husband is provoked to the surface via a cruel prank, either the shock of the caller's message causing the faithless woman to blurt an embarrassing admission she otherwise would have kept to herself, or a sudden desire for revenge prompting her to counter news of her husband's perfidy with a confession of her own two-timing. Compounding the betrayal, her amour is not just some random man, but the husband's brother. To top it off, news of her hanky-panky is broadcast to all of Texas, making the husband's humiliation complete.

As a cautionary tale, the story serves up a troubling question: How well do we really know our partners? While we would like to think we know them very well, the sad fact is spouses have cheated on spouses throughout history. Is it therefore not possible that our own marriages or long-term pairings might harbor similar dark truths?

As to whether the yarn is truth or invention, while this anecdote does appear in a 1999 collection of "true" tales, our hunting around through a variety of media sources has failed to turn up the story and so confirm that it had indeed happened. A prank phone call from the late 1990s engineered by Oregon radio DJs K.C. and Ron reproduces the legend, though. Interestingly, so does a slightly different clip from an unknown source. Do listen to both, because while what "Lois" (the cheating wife) says is the same in both clips, the DJ's patter with her is different from recording to recording, leading to the potential conclusion that various radio hosts have over the years edited this prank call recording by stripping out another radio host's portion and replacing it with their own to make it appear they themselves placed the call.

Ron Alvarez (of KC and Ron) was kind enough to explain the origin of their clip. "The bit came to us via email from a radio producer friend. I edited and produced it with our voices under the mistaken notion it was originally from an audio bit service." (That's far from unheard of — radio sometimes uses "open-ended interviews" in which individual stations' DJs pose questions from a prompt sheet to celebrities who are not actually in the studio but who have provided a set of pre-recorded answers; e.g., hundreds of radio stations across the U.S. conducted the very same interview with the Fab Four during the first flush of Beatlemania in early 1964, the questions read by each DJ, but the answers voiced by the Beatles themselves.) Alvarez was chagrined to afterwards realize the clip was actually a bit produced by another (as yet unknown) radio jock, and thus wasn't something the show would have reworked for its audience. "Unfortunately, someone recorded it and it's been floating around the web for years," said Alvarez. "Everytime someone contacts us about it, we always tell them we can't take credit."

So for now, we'll regard this story about a pranked wife admitting on air to adultery as a sister legend to the tale about a lad who'd been tricked into thinking he'd won the lottery, which prompted him to tell his wife he was divorcing her and oh, by the way, had been having an affair with her sister for years. Both stories, after all, feature the same structure of a practical joke prompting an admission of adultery committed with the spouse's sibling.

Barbara "sibling rivalry" Mikkelson

Last updated:   9 September 2007

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  Sources:

    Flynn, Mike.   The Best Book of Bizarre But True Stories Ever.

    London: Carlton, 1999.   ISBN 1-85868-558-3.   (p. 298).