ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

For 40 years, people have asked me what Don Imus was really like. And I would ask them if they listened to his show. And if they did I would say, "Then you know what he's really like."

"Everybody thinks it's funny until it's about them," he always said.

He worked without a net for nearly 50 years, on WNBC and then on WFAN and finally WABC.

WFAN was another place where he changed everything. It was an all-sports station before he got there. Just not between six and 10. That was Imus' time, and space. He showed up there and before long the station was the No. 1 in billing in America. It wasn't because the other guys were giving the scores, or telling you what they thought of George Steinbrenner.

People of a certain age remember him best from his years at WFAN. But you had to be listening in the 70s and the 80s when he was at WNBC, one of the iconic places of all time on a radio dial. His studio was like one large, permissive room. One day Howard Cosell came walking in when I was in the studio with Don and his longtime sidekick Charles McCord. Then the old basketball player Daryl Dawkins showed up. Somehow it was as if they'd all been working together the way Imus and McCord did. And was all funny as hell.

In 1983, after the Russians shot down a Korean Air flight, Imus went down one morning and took down the Russian flag from the array of flags at Rockefeller Center. Then he went on the air and said, "I'll give the Commies back their flag when they apologize for shooting innocent people out of the sky."

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