Herb Tarlek

Herb Tarlek (Herbert Ruggles Tarlek Jr., born 1946) is a character on the television situation comedy "WKRP in Cincinnati" (1978-1982). He was played by actor Frank Bonner. He also starred as the same character on the sequel, "The New WKRP in Cincinnati".

ales manager not so extraordinaire

Herb is the sales manager at radio station WKRP, but he is unable to get any major advertising agencies to buy time on the station, partly because of WKRP's poor ratings and partly because the advertising agency people loathe Herb personally. The clients Herb does get for the station are often disreputable or sleazy, like Shady Hills Rest Home, Gone With the Wind Estates, Ferryman Funeral Homes, and Dave Wickerman, whose "diet pills" turned out to be a legalized form of speed. Herb's most reliable advertising client is Red Wigglers (the "Cadillac of Worms"), though the owner of Red Wigglers, Harvey Green, pulled his commercials off WKRP after the Religious Right threatens a boycott of the station's advertisers ("a lot of religious people fish"). Herb's only real skill is knowing how to collect money from deadbeat clients, often by blackmailing them. He admits to program director Andy Travis that it took time to develop that skill, saying of one client: "He did that to me [failed to pay up] twenty times. Then I got smart."

Herb also repeats this skill in The New WKRP in Cincinnati, where he bails rookie salesman Arthur Carlson, Jr. out of a ticket trade scam for a freak show operator. Though the contract legally binds the station to air the show's ads, Herb is released from the contract after he threatens to take legal action against the promoter, who has habitually left a string of unpaid debts to other radio stations.

Herb is best known for his atrocious taste in clothes. He always wears a white belt and white shoes; most of his suits are made of polyester and are covered in loud plaid patterns. He claims to get his suits in a golf pro shop in Kentucky; no one else makes his kind of clothes anymore due to anti-pollution laws. While Herb's co-workers mock his fashion sense ("Somewhere there's a Volkswagen without seat covers"), Herb claims that his suits put his clients at ease, conveying the message "trust me, sign my deal! I know what I'm doing." He is proven right in the episode "Changes", when he switches over to a tasteful wardrobe; his lowbrow clients don't trust someone with such a highbrow wardrobe, and Herb quickly returns to his old way of dressing.

Herb prefers personal luxury cars for what he believes is necessary for a job of his caliber. In the episode "Baby If You've Ever Wondered", he suggests an across-the-board raise (which he calculates by taking away Carlson's share of the station sales commissions). When he figures out the final sum, he tosses the calculator on his desk, declaring "Oh yes, we are definitely talking Cordoba!" This is realized in the subsequent episode "Real Families", where his car is indeed revealed to be a 1980 Chrysler Cordoba.

Herb sometimes tries to make money by doing other things on the side, like selling life insurance or running a numbers racket. He also collects kickbacks from his advertising clients and from the disc jockeys (for getting them endorsements and other outside work); in the pilot he boasts that "they don't call me 'Mr. Kickback' for nothing."

At WKRP, Herb is considered a troublemaker and "general jackass" by his co-workers, but they all have a certain grudging affection for him.

Personal life

Herb is married to Lucille (Edie McClurg), a slightly overweight and feisty brunette with a high-pitched voice, and has two children: Bunny, a smart girl with an interest in animals and the environment, and Herb III, a shy boy who likes to play with dolls, much to Herb's chagrin. In the episode "Real Families," Herb's family is profiled on a network TV reality show. Herb tries to convey the impression that he is a hard working, clean-living all-American guy, but as the episode goes on, the TV hosts systematically expose his incompetence as a worker and as a family man. At the end, Herb throws the camera crew out of his house, but still remains so desperate to be on television that he accepts an invitation to fly out to Hollywood and meet the hosts. In "Never Leave Me, Lucille," Herb and Lucille briefly split up, while in "Frog Story," he causes the death of his daughter's pet frog by accidentally spray-painting it.

Herb's widowed father, Herbert R. Tarlek Sr. (Bert Parks) is a traveling salesman with a similar wardrobe and outlook on life. However, he is more charming than his son, and more successful at his trade, as proven when he sells an entire collection of knockoff Indian jewelry to Carlson.

He constantly hits on the station's receptionist, Jennifer Marlowe, and tells every man he meets that he and Jennifer are a couple, but when she finally agrees to go on a date with him in the episode "Put Up or Shut Up," he begins to hyperventilate (an act he repeats in later episodes when under stress); though he doesn't like to admit it publicly, he is faithful to Lucille; the closest he ever came to adultery was during the episode "Hotel Oceanview", where he got drunk and began kissing a woman he vaguely recognized from high school, but couldn't place...who turned out to be a man who had undergone sex reassignment surgery.

Herb also tends to drink too much, and at one point, his three-martini lunches with clients leads him to the brink of full-blown alcoholism, though station manager Arthur Carlson convinces him to get the problem under control before it is too late.

He has a fondness for pornographic movies with titles like "Kick Me, Kiss Me," and in one episode he sneaks out of the hospital (where he has been admitted for heart tests) to take Les Nessman to a theater where they show adult films in 3-D. He sometimes writes letters to "Penthouse" magazine, though they are never published. He is once arrested on a morals charge, though he maintains that "it's a complete lie -- I don't even know the names of those girls!"

Behind the scenes

The writers of "WKRP" did many episodes focusing on Herb; in the third season of the series, no less than six of the twenty-two episodes were Herb stories. One writer, Peter Torokvei, said that horribly flawed characters like Herb were more interesting to write for than a more self-assured character like Jennifer Marlowe. Another staff writer, Steven Kampmann, recalled that he liked writing for Herb because he was one of the few characters on the show with a wife and family, which added more dimensions to his character.

Frank Bonner directed six episodes of the series.

The role of Herb Tarlek was originally offered to the character actor Rod McCary, but he turned it down to appear in another series.

Cultural references

Canadian band Rheostatics paid tribute to Herb Tarlek in their song, "The Tarleks". [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03M3hXYojqU]

In the mid-1980's, an Ann Arbor punk band was called the Herb Tarleks. Their signature song was "Call Me an Asshole". Typically, the band would implore the audience to do so, and the audience responded as such.