More often than not, he kept the show moving before the bits failed.

I don't know why more people don't get this. Listen to shows where Opie's not there, Nana and the Worm will just keep beating a bit into the ground 10 minutes after it was funny.

Maybe occasionally he'll kill something with a bit of potential left, but I'd rather lose a few jokes than sit through repetitive joke killing over and over.

And I can't overstate the value of Opie cutting off Anthony's long political rants, especially about current topics that are not the least bit interesting years later.

If they still had opie maybe he would have cut off the chip show before episode 69

Anthony, especially if Jimmy was gone too, would just bring Danny and Sam in studio and just watch YouTube videos over and over. Zero effort.

I will never forget the show where Ant & Jim were talking about the same thing for around 2 hours. It might have been the Trayvon Martin thing, but they were just repeating the same 2 or 3 points over and over again.

This wasn't that, It was one of Ant's dull rants but this time Jimmy was disagreeing with him and they just kept going on and on but they just kept circling around to the same 3 points, and Opie wasn't there to move the show along.

Jim would constantly do that, he'd have one constructed sentence of an arguement and no matter what anybody responded with he'd go "yeah but, i just think" and repeat the same exact thing over and over.

Rebuttal

....around about the middle he brings a good riff to a screeching halt, over nothing.

I'd rather have Opie there to hate than not have him there. People bitch about him going to callers, but involving the audience reminds you you're listening to a radio program. Take out the hacky radio guy and what do you have? A proto YKWD.

Opie being there is what made it special. He's a reminder that you are listening to radio, and it has no right to be as good as it is despite the platform. It makes it into a sort of bizarro program you stumble on flipping through channels.

I know it's a bit but he had a pretty damn hard job trying to always stay on with attention to and guess when the joke or bit was going to dry up and go into Artie&Anthony-territory of horrible shit. Sometimes you make too much of a hasty call but most often than not i bet the comedians were happy with it because it was all done to protect their image of being funny off the cuff.

You have to move onto new subjects, sometimes by trampling all over the guests on the show. Because they were part of the conversation rather than some interview they did with them most of the time.

Hence why i continue to claim half the retards calling for Opie's head had always been stupid. They don't know it's a radio-show. He's respected by other radio-legends he hasn't burned bridges with, for a reason.

Another good example is how the Bonfire runs bits to the fucken ground.

He steered the ship. Plain and simple.

You're right about Jim and Sam. They frequently start the show with something in politics, and go on about it for 40-60 minutes. And it's always that they spend the first 10 playing the story, have 5 minutes of pontificating, and then the rest of the time is spent repeating the same points.

History will vindicate the Opester. Just like Hitler.

Yep. He was quick as fuck with a line, too -- usually an underappreciated one. He gets a bad rap as a frat boy but the guy could go punch for punch with Patrice, for fuck's sake. On top of all of that, he set the tone and engaged the audience in a way that nobody else in that studio could possibly handle. It's fun to call him a completely talentless moron with no thoughts, feelings, or personality of his own, who every intelligent person immediately hates, and who has giant jiggler tits, and is incapable of performing even the most basic required job skills above an average level (at best), but he was the most important person in the room.

I feel like he was losing his touch the last couple of years. It felt like he was getting a lot more trigger happy and was more unwilling to let things breathe. But I chalk that up to age and he seemed like he wanted out of the type of show they were doing. I will say in his defense, Ant's alcoholism was having a visible effect on the show by 2009.

He did a lot to cover how racist Ant had become the last several years of the show. With Ant in general, his show is dying for Opie or someone like him. He needs someone to keep the program moving, he needs someone that isn't willing to just coast and he also needs someone that's willing to be a bad guy.

I don't think Jim is as bad but he needs to fucking stop running the board. It's cute that he wants control but if Jim wants the show to be even remotely not shitty, he needs to let Sam run and control the show.

All the bits are as good as they were because they were as long as they were thanks to Opie.

Fuck Opie

Is this what we're doing now? We're defending Opie?

The only reason Opie cut off bits, is because he wasn't a part of them. Did it work out in the formula of their show? Yes. Did he also cut off Cumia from his biweekly gun tirade? Not often enough. But the fact remains, Opie did it out of spite, not skill.